Redundant (and too long) content in metatag 'description' when using short desc

[SteP[IT]]

I'm working on the SEO side of my new website, and noticed the VM 'description' metatag is currently generated by using both the 'product name', the 'category name' and the 'short description' fields (obviously in the case the 'metatag' data are not explicitally set inside the producut using the metadata optional fields) .
But the first two fields are already used for the "title" metatag generation.
Due to the 160 characters truncation made by Google in "description" metatag, I suggest you to use only the description field, giving to the SEO writer more usability in metatag content (the name and category fields are already used for the 'title' metatag, and do not need to be repeated for the 'description' one, wasting a lot of characters to be better used...). May be you could also implement the '160 char' lenght truncation when extracting the tag, avoiding unuseful data to be wrtitten in metatag.
Waiting for your kindly considerations.
Regards

[fotonio]

If you want to do SEO well you should fill the meta description by hand if you want to attract more clients and use good keywords to affect search ranking. No automatic tool can do that better than you. The character limit is now 150. But more important for Seo is the content in the product details and good descriptions in category pages, having SSL enabled in all pages, etc. There are plenty of seo guides in the web, here is one i like https://ahrefs.com/blog/ecommerce-seo/

[SteP[IT]]

This is obvious.
But think to someone (like me) having thousands of products to be changed. You need time to get all SEO rewritten, and having a fallback may help alot.

[fotonio]

If you have a lot of products, i suggest you to use either csvi improved or jsitemap pro so you can export your products to csv format. Then you can mass edit them (ex. copying short descriptions to meta descriptions and clean them form html code, character counting, etc.) and then import them back. Unfortunately Virtuemart does not have built-in feature to mass export or import products like other shopping carts like magento.

[SteP[IT]]

I have bulk product upload system.
I'm not asking here how to get optimal SEO.
The question is more simpler: I have to deal with existent data while updating them as necessary, so VM should NOT add product name and product category to the metatag description in any case. Those data are reduntant and not useful.

[fotonio]

Jsitemap pro lets you clear current metadata and can autogenerate it for you or lets you customize it as you like. Check its documentation. It may help.

[SteP[IT]]

I would like to maintain very few additional components in my site, so having right basic feature implemented in VM should be enough.

[jjk]

...and do not need to be repeated for the 'description' one, wasting a lot of characters to be better used...)

In my opinion this doesn't make sense in your case, because if you don't enter an individual meta description for a product you decided not to take advantage it (until you have the time to do so). So VM isn't wasting characters.

If you didn't change it, VM uses this:
Browser/page title = category name + product name (You wrote 'meta title', which is something different and ignored by Google just like 'keywords').
If the meta description is left empty, VM calculates it (but doesn't store it in the database) from product name + category name + short description.

...avoiding unuseful data to be wrtitten in metatag

Even though some 'keywords' related to your product will be the same as the page title, it is not useless. Google looks for matches of the search terms somebody has typed into the Google search box and compares this with page content it has indexed. If the search terms exist in the meta description, Google will usually display it in the the serps. It might even read beyond the 160 characters, but truncates longer text in the serps. If the meta description is empty or doesn't contain the words which the user searched for, Google might pick any piece of text which it finds on the page and which it thinks it describes the content (which could be something different from what you want to see there).

Having  the product name in the title and the meta description is a strong signal for Google that the page content is about the product name. So 'product name + category name + short description' is likely to rank higher than just 'short description'. If yours is longer than 160 characters, you might have to think about if your titles suffer from keyword stuffing.

[AH]

All this is great discussion regarding what someone specifically wants or does not want.  It is bound to be based heavily on how someone manages their products.  The aim as jjk noted was to align meta data to each other element

Product
Category
S_desc

Creating the description based on these would give a "continuity" and potentially better ranking than if nothing was provided.

However that is all moot if you dont want it that way - so you can do an override to create the auto meta meta based on whatever you wish.


StepIT

Assuming you don't have ANY meta description data set at product level within your store - you can achieve what you are looking for using a simple template override

Set the elements to whatever you wish - and truncate if necessary

C:\server\htdocs\dbflues3\templates\quorvia\html\com_virtuemart\productdetails\default.php

Code Select Expand


//override some meta
$document = JFactory::getDocument ();
$document->setTitle(strip_tags(html_entity_decode($this->product->product_name . ' : ' . ($this->category->category_name ? (vmText::_($this->category->category_name)) : '') ,ENT_QUOTES)));
$document->setDescription(strip_tags(html_entity_decode($this->product_name,ENT_QUOTES)) . " " . $this->category->category_name . " " . (vmText::_(strip_tags(html_entity_decode($this->product->product_s_desc,ENT_QUOTES)))) );
?>



Adjust as required and give it a try.

[SteP[IT]]

OK, clear: thanks