On 2010-03-18 10:04, Ashley Sheridan wrote:
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.
I do not see how that is any more or less of an problem than today with
pages that have meta description missing,
what do those parsers do then? Do they stop at </head> ? What do they
use as description instead? The first paragraph?
The parsers used by all major search engines certainly do not halt, they
break down the entire page right?
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.
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,
allowing blind people to more rapidly jump from page to page.
Currently the meta description is not always good content, would be
interesting to see a Google analysis of how the meta description is used,
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.
Roger.
--
Roger "Rescator" Hågensen.
Freelancer - http://EmSai.net/
