SEO Forum Description

[cmeinck]

Using XF, it appears to grab the category descriptions. It's not ideal if you want to not have those show on your forum. It's almost vital that your first category description meets the overall goal of driving traffic.

Here's XF as an example. That's pulling the snippet from the fourth category, since it's the first with a category description.


Any thoughts or developers with ideas on how we can improve upon this?

 

[Chris D]

Each XenForo page has a relevant meta description tag based upon the <xen:description> tag in each template.

For the forum home page here, the meta description is:

It is simply: "Forum software by XenForo".

You can see that quite clearly too in your screenshot.

However, Google will take it upon itself to pull more content from the page based on your search terms. No one has any control over this except Google. I've seen Google search results completely ignore the meta description before.

 

[cmeinck]

Each XenForo page has a relevant meta description tag based upon the <xen:description> tag in each template.

For the forum home page here, the meta description is:

It is simply: "Forum software by XenForo".

You can see that quite clearly too in your screenshot.

However, Google will take it upon itself to pull more content from the page based on your search terms. No one has any control over this except Google. I've seen Google search results completely ignore the meta description before.

I was curious if there was something which could be done to customize rich snippets. We do have control now using Category descriptions. I have one sub-forum that Google ranks and pulls the proper description. Where I don't have descriptions, Google pulls the last post. When you search for my site + forums, it pulls the first category description. It's not so much the search, but the on page content Google is prioritizing.