arc_meta - Improve Your SEO

maniqui · 2014-04-29 14:52:35

A feature request: adding a new tab (suggestion: under “Content -> Metadata”) to edit the meta-title and meta-description for sections.
Rationale: there is at least one plugin (rah_flat) that disables the “Presentation -> Sections” tab while enabled, making it impossible to edit the meta-title and meta-description fields added by arc_meta.

monkeyninja · 2014-04-29 18:06:53

maniqui wrote #280489:

A feature request: adding a new tab (suggestion: under “Content -> Metadata”) to edit the meta-title and meta-description for sections.
Rationale: there is at least one plugin (rah_flat) that disables the “Presentation -> Sections” tab while enabled, making it impossible to edit the meta-title and meta-description fields added by arc_meta.

Hi maniqui, I’ve not yet had chance to look into rah_flat so not sure what impact it would have on arc_meta. Your suggestion is interesting though. Is the issue just related to sections? Perhaps it would make sense to have a Content -> Section Metadata tab if that can be enabled/disabled from the plugin’s settings.

maniqui · 2014-05-08 16:28:04

Hi monkeyninja. I missed your reply.

Hi maniqui, I’ve not yet had chance to look into rah_flat so not sure what impact it would have on arc_meta.

Maybe I wasn’t clear: when enabled, rah_flat restricts access to “Presentation -> Sections” tab, thus, making it impossible to edit any fields, including those added by arc_meta.

Your suggestion is interesting though. Is the issue just related to sections? Perhaps it would make sense to have a Content -> Section Metadata tab if that can be enabled/disabled from the plugin’s settings.

It sounds like a good idea. Also, metadata (including section metadata) is more related to content than to presentation, imo. So, content editors (ie. site owner, for example) should be able to edit these metadata fields, even if they don’t have granted permissions for accessing the “Presentation” tab.

maniqui · 2014-05-08 16:34:52

While here, there is something else I’d like to share: I see that lengths for fields are hardcoded in the plugin. For example, the title field is limited to 65 characters and the description field is limited to 150. Although I can understand that these upper limits are related to the usual length these fields have on some search engine results pages (and other crawlers and/or indexers), I find the constrain a bit arbitrary and somewhat limiting.
I’d rather let the user input any amount of text on these fields, or cap its upper limits via plugin’s code (with a value that could be seat in the plugin’s options), instead of silently truncating it on the database.
What do you think?

Pat64 · 2014-05-11 14:07:34

(Off topic)

#@admin
#@language fr-fr
arc_meta_article_title => Forme du titre des articles (meta)
arc_meta_comment_title => Forme du titre des commentaires (meta)
arc_meta_search_title => Forme du titre des recherches (meta)
arc_meta_category_title => Forme du titre des catégories (meta)
arc_meta_section_title => Forme du titre des sections (meta)
arc_meta_homepage_title => Forme du titre de la page d’accueil (meta)

Gocom · 2014-05-11 17:59:13

maniqui wrote #280677:

Maybe I wasn’t clear: when enabled, rah_flat restricts access to “Presentation -> Sections” tab, thus, making it impossible to edit any fields, including those added by arc_meta.

rah_flat uses Textpattern’s permission model. The site admin or other plugin can bring any of the panels back by explicitly setting overriding privileges for the panel:

add_privs('section', '1,2,3');

…in the other plugin’s (i.e. arc_metas) source code, after rah_flat has been loaded (achievable with load order). On import rah_flat will not overwrite any fields that are not defined in the flat JSON file.

It sounds like a good idea. Also, metadata (including section metadata) is more related to content than to presentation, imo. So, content editors (ie. site owner, for example) should be able to edit these metadata fields, even if they don’t have granted permissions for accessing the “Presentation” tab.

Similarly users additional users can be given access the Presentation panels:

global $txp_permissions;
$txp_permissions['tab.presentation'] =  '1,2,3,4,5';
$txp_permissions['section'] = '1,2,3,4,5';

Last edited by Gocom (2014-05-11 18:01:09)

monkeyninja · 2014-06-14 14:51:56

I’ve added support for robots and keywords meta tags. I will look into exposing the section meta data to all users next.

maniqui · 2014-06-26 18:41:13

Hi Andy.
A suggestion/request: on meta fields for sections, it could be helpful to have a simple text field to store an image ID. This way, we could “attach” images to section metadata and have them properly output on og or twitter card. Otherwise, having an image “attached” to a section metadata is a bit more difficult.
Thanks.

visualpeople · 2014-07-16 23:18:41

I have a question about how the individual fields (Meta title, Meta description, etc.) are ‘registered’ on the Write screen.

What I’m getting at is I’d like to use bot_write_tab_customize to move the Meta title field and Meta description field underneath the title itself but none of those are listed in the menu under Write Tab Customize — which I’ve never encountered before. Usually, anything added to the write screen is listed there to hide/show or move around. The only option right now seems to move the WHOLE meta box, but obviously, that comes with the keywords and url-only-title, etc., which confuses everyday users…

I realize this is beyond what this plugin does since I want it to interact with another completely separate plugin, but I’m just hoping someone can shed some light on why they’re not showing up and how I can get them to.

douglgm · 2014-08-31 15:19:16

Andy, a couple of little snags I’ve found:

1. If you try to enter a meta-robots without also supplying a description or title then the meta-robots will be ignored and not set.

2. Automatically setting the meta-robots to noindex, nofollow when you’re in debug or testing mode might not be the best idea. It could actually cause pages to be removed from Google’s index. A better alternative would be to use a robots.txt to prevent the site from being crawled or put the site behind basic authentication.

I don’t tend to use debug/testing on a live site.

monkeyninja · 2014-09-02 18:10:36

douglgm wrote #283380:

Andy, a couple of little snags I’ve found:

1. If you try to enter a meta-robots without also supplying a description or title then the meta-robots will be ignored and not set.

2. Automatically setting the meta-robots to noindex, nofollow when you’re in debug or testing mode might not be the best idea. It could actually cause pages to be removed from Google’s index. A better alternative would be to use a robots.txt to prevent the site from being crawled or put the site behind basic authentication.

I don’t tend to use debug/testing on a live site.

Thanks for spotting the bug. The robots should now save as of version 1.1.4.

As for your second point this feature was added to make it easy to prevent the likes of Google from indexing sites under development. People shouldn’t be using debug/testing on a live site as this will potentially expose sensitive error messages to the world. Textpattern recommends only using these statuses on a local or secured directory. If people don’t like this feature I could add an extra attribute to <arc_meta_robots /> to disable it (not sure what the attribute would be called though). arc_meta isn’t the only plugin that does this. cbe_if_prod_status has a similar feature (which can’t be disabled at all).

douglgm · 2014-09-03 17:53:31

Thanks for the update. With regard to the second point – absolutely agree and would recommend putting the dev site behind some kind of authentication.

The reason I raise it is due to recent experience. I’ve been contact by two web designers in the last month who were in a state of panic after deploying their dev site (wordpress) and forgetting to remove the noindex directive.

They only noticed a few days later when search traffic started to dry up as google removed the site from it’s index.

Don’t know what the best way to stop that from happening to be honest.

Thanks again.

maniqui · 2015-01-16 16:00:01

After checking that the arc_meta_twitter_card outputs some content even if the article’s meta description field is empty (while other arc_meta tags that also provides a description tag, don’t output anything) , I skimmed over the code and found this:

function arc_meta_twitter_card($atts) {
    ...
    $description = $description===null ? _arc_meta_description() : $description;
    ...
}

I see that you use a private function (_arc_meta_description) which is used to get generate some meta description, even if the field (the one created by arc_meta) is empty. In that case, tt will resort to the article’s body field, stripping and trimming it.

Now, I’m curious why you didn’t do the same (that is, to call this _arc_meta_description function) for the description content of other arc_meta tags, like arc_meta_open_graph or arc_meta_description.
For those tags, you are doing something like this:

function arc_meta_open_graph($atts) {
     ...
     $description = !empty($meta['description']) ? txpspecialchars($meta['description']) : null;
     ...
}

It seems like an inconsistency to me.
Andy, while you are there hacking the codez, a suggestion: to the logic of _arc_meta_description, I’d add the statement to get a description from the article’s excerpt field, then the body. I’m assuming that there are a few TXP users out there that already use the excerpt field as the place to store the meta description for an article. This change would ease the transition for those installing arc_meta.
That would be something like:

function _arc_meta_description() {
	...
	if (!empty($meta['description'])) {
		$description = txpspecialchars($meta['description']);
	} elseif (!empty($thisarticle['excerpt'])) {
		$description = strip_tags($thisarticle['excerpt']);
		$description = substr($description, 0, 200);
		$description = txpspecialchars($description);
	} elseif (!empty($thisarticle['body'])) {
		$description = strip_tags($thisarticle['body']);
		$description = substr($description, 0, 200);
		$description = txpspecialchars($description);
	} else {
		$description = null;
	}
	...
}

Thanks for reading.

maniqui · 2015-01-18 14:26:09

Andy, I’d suggest to remove (or to increase to a far more higher value) the limits on meta title, meta description and meta keywords (hardcoded on the DB). The lengths should be more a guideline than an strict limit imposed in the code, imo. Yes, Google and other search engines may expect (and show) different character lengths for those fields. But I’d suggest that the end user should have the freedom of writing lengthier titles & description, without the worried of have them “unnaturally/artificially” cut off by arc_meta.
This suggestion goes in the line of writing headings (and, generally speaking, other content, and even code) for humans, not for machines.

My two centavos.

monkeyninja · 2015-01-19 19:25:44

Hi maniqui, there was some logic to my madness with the meta descriptions. My original thinking was that you’d only want to include the meta description when you’ve set one using the Meta Description field. So if one isn’t provided it doesn’t output the tags and Google, etc., will just do their thing. The reason the Twitter card included a description whatever was a requirement by Twitter that the description tag must be present.

I guess there is no harm always including the meta description and taking a truncated text from the excerpt/body if no meta description has been provided.

A few people have asked for the field limits to be increased, so I will look into doing this for the next release.

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#16 2014-04-29 14:52:35

Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO

#17 2014-04-29 18:06:53

Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO

maniqui wrote #280489:

#18 2014-05-08 16:28:04

Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO

#19 2014-05-08 16:34:52

Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO

#20 2014-05-11 14:07:34

Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO

#21 2014-05-11 17:59:13

Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO

maniqui wrote #280677:

#22 2014-06-14 14:51:56

Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO

#23 2014-06-26 18:41:13

Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO

#24 2014-07-16 23:18:41

Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO

#25 2014-08-31 15:19:16

Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO

#26 2014-09-02 18:10:36

Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO

douglgm wrote #283380:

#27 2014-09-03 17:53:31

Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO

#28 2015-01-16 16:00:01

Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO

#29 2015-01-18 14:26:09

Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO

#30 2015-01-19 19:25:44

Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO

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