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Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO
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.
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Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO
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).
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Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO
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.
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Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO
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.
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Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO
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.
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Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO
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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Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO
arc_meta v1.3.0 is available now. I’ve increased the field limits for meta titles and descriptions. There’s also support for social graph/Twitter card images on categories and sections.
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Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO
NicolasGraph wrote #289677:
Hi,
What about adding the same meta image field in the write tab for users (like me?) who would like to have a dedicate image for sharing features?
I can certainly look into adding this. It will probably not make the next release that I am currently finishing off. There’s quite a few new things in the next planned version of the plugin and if I add the meta image field to the write tab I want to do it right (i.e. make it optional via plugin preferences). I don’t want to feel rushed at getting that in to the next version.
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Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO
v1.4 is out now with new Social Graph tags and an interface for section meta data as requested by several people.
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Re: arc_meta - Improve Your SEO
Thanks for your work!
I have this error message on upgrade or on install (after removing the previous version) :
Erreur lors du chargement du plugin : arc_meta -> Notice: Undefined index: arc_meta_section_tab on line 427Offline