Solved: Confused over meta name="description" and meta pro...

mrmoorey · ‎09-22-2016

Hi there,

I've scoured the Weebly boards, and the wider Internet and cannot seem to get a clear picture of what difference there is with the meta tags when it comes to descriptions. Google search is showing my descriptions and so is bing, but bing's webmaster tool complains that my site is missing a description in the head.

My approach has been as follows:

1) Leave the Site Description in the Settings > SEO blank.

2) Set an SEO Page Description for each of my pages using Pages > SEO Settings > Page Description

The result is that the page source shows <head> containing:

1) <meta property="og:description" content="What I put in the Page Description"/>

2) <meta property="description" content="What I put in the Page Description"/>

However, Googling meta site description discusses the need for <meta name="description" content="..."/>. Moz is a good example of where they discuss this. So, if I add a tag for <meta name="description".../> in the head section of the page, does this solve the problems reported by bing webmaster, and is it necessary?

None of this is clear. To make matters worse, I found an article that says you can combine both approaches and have the following tag:

If I continue to use my approach as described above and use the Settings > SEO > Site Description, it is overruled by the Page Descriptions anyway. So, at no point does it seem that my site contains a <meta name="description".../> tag, despite what all the SEO sites say it should have.

So, what is the correct answer? Do I add my own custom meta tag in the header? Is <meta name="description".../> superfluous? Am I overthinking this whole SEO business?

Your input would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

mrmoorey · ‎09-23-2016

I have answered my question regarding name="description" vs property="desciption". In bing webmaster, my home page warned that I did not have a name="description" tag because Weebly appears to only generate property="description" and property="og:description" when I leave the site description blank and enter a value for the page description.

I added an entry in the Header Code section of my home page with a name="description" tag and this morning bing webmaster tools stopped complaining about the lack of a description. Checking the page source confirmed this. Note that adding text via the Header Code box adds the description at the end of the <head> section, so you will have to either search or scroll down to find it.

However... when I did the same thing to my other pages bing webmaster complained I had duplicate descriptions. When I looked at the page source, Weebly had generated a property="og:description" and name="description" tag for pages not marked as home. So, I changed the entries in the Header Code section of my non home-page pages to be property="description" and everything is fine according to bing webmaster.

Incidentally, Google Webmaster tools never complained about any of this, except for duplicate descriptions across pages from blogs, which I don't think we can control. One can only assume bing uses a different mechanism for handling page descriptions.

So the TL;DR regarding this topic:

1) SEO Site Description blank.

2) Home page SEO Page Description filled; SEO Header Code has meta name="description" tag.

3) All other pages have SEO Page Description filled; SEO Header Code has meta property="description" tag.

4) Blog pages all have SEO Post Title and SEO Post Description filled (accessible from Post Options > Advanced when editing the blog text)

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Queso · ‎09-22-2016

Hey there! It sounds like you're going pretty deep into SEO. If you haven't yet, I'd recommend taking a read through our guide here.

mrmoorey · ‎09-22-2016

I have a mantra of do it once, do it right. Unfortunately, information available online, and in the article you linked, doesn't seem to answer my fundamental question: Do I need, as I see on many SEO discussions, both meta name="description" as well as meta property="description" in the <head> of my pages, and if so, what fields do I fill in to make this happen automatically in Weebly? If the SEO answer is yes you do need both, and the Weebly answer is, "we don't do this automatically at the moment", then what I'm looking for is what is the approach I should take to make this happen?

I feel I'm close to an answer based on my observations, which is that Weebly does not seem to generate the meta name="description" tag. If this can be confirmed, I believe I can solve this through adding the tag in the SEO > Header Code section of each page and I will have a perfect workaround.

If someone can either confirm my question regarding the need for both tags, or give me a clear explaination as to why I only need one or the other I would be very grateful.

Thanks again...

mrmoorey · ‎09-23-2016