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On Fri, 2010-03-19 at 13:43 +0100, Roger Hågensen wrote:<BR>
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On 2010-03-18 10:04, Ashley Sheridan wrote: <BR>
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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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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>
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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>
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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>
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Roger.
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--
Roger "Rescator" Hågensen.
Freelancer - <A HREF="http://EmSai.net/">http://EmSai.net/</A>
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Search engines and people are not the only content parsers. Sure, you would expect a parser to maybe look further into the content if the description meta tag was missing, but imagine if a parser had to do this for all the content it looked at? There are still overheads to consider.<BR>
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Why not just use server-side code to output the first paragraph of content as the description for the page also?<BR>
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I just feel that the <head> and <body> areas of a page have two distinct uses, and unnecessary crossovers shouldn't occur if it's avoidable.<BR>
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Thanks,<BR>
Ash<BR>
<A HREF="http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk">http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk</A><BR>
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