Auto generated meta description tag in Drupal

[kevgrand]

Was having issues on Drupal not autogenerating a meta  description tag, but I think I have figured it out. Just to verify, would this piece of code be the meta description tag (reason I ask is b/c it looks a little different than the usual tag I have seen):

[TakeshiYoung]

The meta description tag looks like this:

<meta < span="">name="description" content="The Description"></meta <>

The code that you posted is an Open Graph description tag, which is used by Facebook to determine what description to show when your content is shared on Facebook.

[kevgrand]

Gah. Thanks. Really having trouble getting Drupal to auto-generate a description meta tag based on a summary of the page (or at least the first lead sentence). This fix is for a high output, multi author blog. Any suggestions?

[TakeshiYoung]

It's really not necessary to auto generate a meta description. They have zero SEO value.

The only thing they are used for is the text that shows up in the search results. If you don't have a meta description set, Google will just pull the text from your site that it thinks it is most relevant. If you want to override that with a custom description, that's fine and can increase CTR, but this is something you would want to do manually, not auto generate it.

[inhouseninja]

I completely agree and as a general rule I only focus alot of energy and time on meta description if a keyword ranking has shown a significant increase in ranking but has hit a wall. Say you have gone from 45-19 in Google but the extra links and social media don't seem to be helping. Then it's time to really focus on Title Tag and Meta description because the click through rate is going to really help you get that last mile to get on page one

[kevgrand]

Thanks this is really helpful. What tweaked me on this was the weekly SEO Moz crawls of my campaigns that were reporting back "missing meta description" with a giant red "error" button.