Open AnitaYCheng opened 3 weeks ago
General consensus in the 18F content team is that meta descriptions on the 18F site are a nice-to-have, but not prioritized.
Google (and other search engines) seems to use different things to populate search result descriptions, not always using the meta description content provided on the page.
Although, consolidating the functions of excerpt
and description
would help reduce confusion when people are creating new blog posts.
Expected behavior
There should be content in
<meta name="description" content="HOPEFULLY STUFF GOOGLE WILL USE">
Actual behavior
Many pages on 18f.gsa.gov have nonexistent meta descriptions. Example: the homepage:
One page has a nonsensical description:
Observations
The
meta.html
template only callsdescription
and not many pages actually have adescription
value in their front matter.Pages in the main nav have
lead
which is the subheading. Older blog posts have bothexcerpt
anddescription
which are often duplicative. More recent blog posts haveexcerpts
in front matter, used in blog collections. The excerpt is not visible in the blog post itself.Suggested fixes
excerpt
anddescription
and maybelead
for pages in the main nav