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On 2010-03-18 10:04, Ashley Sheridan wrote:
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The main problem with that would be that parsers would then need to
read into the <body> of the page to produce a description of your
site. This might not produce much of an overhead on a one-off basis,
but imagine a parser that is grabbing the description from hundreds or
thousands of pages, then this could become a bit of a problem.<br>
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<br>
I do not see how that is any more or less of an problem than today with
pages that have meta description missing,<br>
what do those parsers do then? Do they stop at </head> ? What do
they use as description instead? The first paragraph?<br>
The parsers used by all major search engines certainly do not halt,
they break down the entire page right?<br>
<br>
As for delays, that is not an issue for consumers, I can not recall any
browser ever showing me the meta description unless I explicitly view
page properties.<br>
I can imagine that the seeing impaired community would love something
like this, as it would basically tell screenreaders that "this" is the
first paragraph/summary/description/teaser of the page,<br>
allowing blind people to more rapidly jump from page to page.<br>
<br>
Currently the meta description is not always good content, would be
interesting to see a Google analysis of how the meta description is
used,<br>
i.e. how many are basically repeating page content (like I do) and how
many just dump keywords in there, how many pages on a site have a site
wide identical description? And so on.<br>
<br>
Roger.<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Roger "Rescator" Hågensen.
Freelancer - <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://EmSai.net/">http://EmSai.net/</a>
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