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Remove meta description?

According to Google, it's better to have no description than a duplicate., so I am trying to remove the meta description from paginated pages.

I know you can edit the description with $sender->Head->addTag('meta'... but how can I completely remove it? I don't want an empty description, I want no description tag on the page at all. Is this possible? Is there a reverse to Head->addTag?

Comments

  • x00x00 MVP
    edited August 2015

    https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en#1

    It is nothing to do with SEO which meta description has nothing to do with these days. It is just they may not display the boiler plate on searches. I wouldn't worry.

    grep is your friend.

  • Is there a reverse to Head->addTag?

      /**
           * Removes any tags with the specified $Tag, $Property, and $Value.
           *
           * Only $Tag is required.
           *
           * @param string The name of the tag to remove from the head.  ie. "link"
           * @param string Any property to search for in the tag.
           *    - If this is an array then it will be treated as a query of attribute/value pairs to match against.
           * @param string Any value to search for in the specified property.
           */
          public function ClearTag($Tag, $Property = '', $Value = '') {
    

    I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.

  • Thank you. I'm not sure I'm using it correctly though. I tried both of these, and neither worked, am I missing something?

    $sender->Head->ClearTag('meta');

    and

    $sender->Head->ClearTag('meta', 'description');

    Thanks for the help!

  • If you don't want to adhere to x00's suggestion and you want to know mechanics.

    this should help you with your experimentation.

    here is an example of an addTag with a meta and description. Should be a similar way through ClearTag.

     $this->AddTag('meta', array('name' => 'description', 'property' => 'og:description', 'itemprop' => 'description', 'content' => $Description));
    

    I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.

  • where are you putting the code?

    grep is your friend.

  • In a custom plugin in this function:
    public function discussionsController_render_before($sender)

  • you would need to use the beforeToString hook, as the head module is during render.

    However there is a better way.

    in your hook do $sender->description(false);

    grep is your friend.

  • You could have also added a meta tag to tell search engines to ignore the description. Either way this does very little.

    grep is your friend.

  • $sender->description(true, '');
    

    should work

    grep is your friend.

  • phreakphreak Vanilla*APP (White Label) & Vanilla*Skins Shop MVP

    @almostbasic: Where did you read that Google recommends empty descriptions?

    I read this here:

    Programmatically generate descriptions. For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description. For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions can be impossible. In the latter case, however, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and are encouraged. Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse, as we talked about in the first point above. The page-specific data we mentioned in the second point is a good candidate for programmatic generation. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don't give users a clear idea of the page's content, and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular snippet.

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