Forum meta keywords, description and Google

[AjiNIMC]

I run a forum with over 2,50,000 posts and may be some 50k topics that sums out to be around 10k pages. It is not possible to manually assign keywords and description for all 10k pages (+around 50 pages getting generated everyday).

I throw following question for discussion:

1. What effect will it have on Google listings if I don't have meta keywords and description for 10k pages? [/li]
   
2. What effect will it have on Google listings if I generate meta keywords and description automatically using a small script?[/li]
   
3. What effect will it have on Google listings if I have few pages with same descriptions and keywords?[/li]
   

Thanks in advance.
AjiNIMC

[tedster]

You can forget about the keywords meta tag. Google doesn't use it at all, and neither does any other major search engine - with the possible exception of Yahoo who may still use it at a very low level for alternate spellings and typos.

As a general rule, however, meta description, can be helpful. See this current thread [webmasterworld.com] for more discussion about this. However, for a forum, generating unique and relevant descriptions can be quite problematic. You're better off, IMO, to stay with none than to generate descriptions that are duplicate or vague, and possibly off-topic.

[AjiNIMC]

Thanks tedster for the reply.

1. How about just showing the first sentence of the first post of the forum topic as meta description?
   
2. How about doing a keyword density checking and then showing the first 6 most used words as keywords (exluding of and other obvious non-keyphrases)
   

(Btw I am also hit by positin #6 penalty :()

[tedster]

1. But won't you end up with "Hi folks. I've been involved with this topic for only a short time and really need some input." If that's not a problem in your case, it could be a worthwhile experiment.

2. As I already mentioned, I don't consider the keyword tag important today. So I wouldn't bother with either the extra computing cycles or the few bytes of extra bandwith.

[Atomic]

I created some functions that dynamically generate both meta keywords and descriptions for my forums. My solution was to hard code some branding (Forum Name:) and tack on a topic's subject line after it. The meta keyword function also tosses in the topic's subject line. It's fairly simple and so far Google seems to love it. One site's got about 7,400 topics into the index as of today.

[g1smd]

A few forums allow the thread starter to write a meta description for the post, and the forum moderators can also see that description as a normal content box placed just above the first post so that they don't have to look at source code to review it and edit it if it is spammy.

[AjiNIMC]

Its been some time I was working closely with community and away from search engines, this #6 penalty just forced me back to the SE world again.

So here I am trying to fix the meta description problem as step#1 for cleaning up task before Matt fixes the penalty stuff.

Meta description help from Google blogs and help center:

• Answering more popular picks: meta tags and web search [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com] -

  "Meta description tag is utilized by Google, can be shown in our search results"

  - Meta keyword is not mentioned at all. Again it says,

  "While the use of a description meta tag is optional and will have no effect on your rankings, a good description can result in a better snippet, which in turn can help to improve the quality and quantity of visitors from our search results."

  - So it matters indirectly then :) .
  
• Improve snippets with a meta description makeover [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com] - This is really great, it also covers about Programmatically generate descriptions. It says,
  

  For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions are more difficult. In the latter case, though, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and is encouraged -- just make sure that your descriptions are not "spammy." Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse, as we talked about in the first point above.
  

  
  
• How do I change my site's title and description? [google.com] - Google help center
  

Now I take this problem in this way:
Step1: Either meta description can be spammy and non-spammy.

• Spammy: When I am adding a lot of keyword stuffy description not relevant to the page. (In this case we are not doing)
  
• Non-Spammy: When I am adding something relevant to the page. It can be 1% relevant or 99.9% relevant. A automated description generator will generate a description which might be close to 10% relevant at the starting and with time we can redefine the algo's to make it closer and closer to 80% relevant most of the time.
  

In any case I feel having an automated description for each page is a better move.

[edited by: AjiNIMC at 2:01 am (utc) on Jan. 10, 2008]

[AjiNIMC]

I don't consider the keyword tag important today

But is there any penalty if we enter some spammy keywords there? Btw I am not sure what Google will consider to be a spammy meta keyword. May be it is alltogether ignoring it, no advantage so no disadvantage also.

I created some functions that dynamically generate both meta keywords and descriptions for my forums.

Hi Atomic, thanks for the reply. I sent you a sticky mail. Lets work together on it, will be good to create a good function for this. I am excited to have this problem now :).

A few forums allow the thread starter to write a meta description for the post

thanks g1smd. For me community member comes first, should never create a issue for them, want to keep it really simple for them. We do have created the keywords and description section for mods but still it is difficult to do it manually all the time.

Need to spend some more time checking the google guidelines for such issues.

[AjiNIMC]

Does meta description played any role in supplement results or #6 penalty?

[edited by: AjiNIMC at 2:10 am (utc) on Jan. 10, 2008]

[tedster]

No one is yet certain what the position #6 is all about. But at least in the past, duplicate meta descriptions were definitely a way for a url to end tagged as Supplementental.

[AjiNIMC]

How about the titles for the forums? See [webmasterworld.com...] .... here all the pages are having the same title as that of the main topic page. Isn't that (slightly) bad? How we can make it a little better?

[tedster]

Each individual thread should have its own title. If the thread gets too long for one page, then it's only a very minor problem that second or third page use the same title. Paginated articles have the same challenge except that you can control an article's title a lot easier than user generated content on a forum.

On WebmasterWorld, how a thread breaks onto pages depends on user settings. The WebmasterWorld url you posted will only "work" properly for a user with preferences set to 10 posts per page. So we do not even try to create unique titles for each page of a thread. I think it would be a confusion for users to change the title on each page of a thread.

[AjiNIMC]

I think it would be a confusion for users to change the title on each page of a thread.

Yeah true, thats certainly a point to worry. I will be discussing these issues with our community today.

[menial]

It's an useful thread, keep it going ;).

I don't use the keyword tag anymore - still wondering if not to remove the description tag too...

[tedster]

From a think-tank point of view, why would Google go to the trouble of adding a duplicate meta description tool to Webmaster Tools if the meta description wasn't helpful in some way -- and potentially more important in the future? It's possible that they are doing this to help the snippet team generate better SERPs. Google has recently reinforced, in several channels, that the description tag is not used for calucalting the actual rankings.

[menial]

I agree meta description could be useful for static pages -- but for dynamically-generated pages (ie. forums) it's virtually not possible to provide an adequate page description... So it's probably best to let Google take care of the text snippet.

[tedster]

I can see that. If the query terms are not semantically related to the page's meta description, then Google generates their own snippet anyway.

[AjiNIMC]

Does different meta description help in making the page a little more unique?

I am referring to a post compiled by Tedster, see
[webmasterworld.com...] (about supplement results and duplicate pages)

Which says,

Also, make sure that every page has a unique title tag and a unique meta description, as failing to do so is another problem that can hurt a site.

So it's probably best to let Google take care of the text snippet.

Yeah, I agree to that, they are better at the job but still we can put a little bit of human intelligence to the meta description. It is about long tail with think head, we can work towards the think head of search terms for a page and leave the long tail for google snippets.

AjiNIMC

[menial]

Yeah, I agree to that, they are better at the job but still we can put a little bit of human intelligence to the meta description.

But how would you do it.. Either way it would look spammy. Assuming you put your chosen keywords in an array and only select these if they appear on the page and make up a description based on that - the end result won't be much better than what Google would come up.. Plus the additional coding and resources - I don't think that's worth it.

[g1smd]

Google applies results clustering for pages that return the same title and/or meta description - and only shows two of those reults per SERP.