remove keyword and description meta tags

Hi,

MODx is a nice CMS. I like it a lot.

I’d like to see the meta keywords and description tags deleted. I can remove them myself of course but I have to explain to my clients that they are useless.

Cheers,
rim

Agreed.

i was wondering if i’d get flamed.

often removing them is not a hassle. but then you run the risk of the client insisting you put them back in. if they’re not there then developers could spend time doing better things.

Actually, I’m not sure what you mean by description tags. I like that field being there.
I also quite like the META tags editor thing, although again I tend to just put things in the template.

For keywords, personally I prefer to use a TV. Whilst there is undoubtedly data efficiency in storing reused words in a table, I’m not entirely certain why anyone would encourage the reuse of keywords throughout a site. The process does overly complicate things for the user.

So yes, I’d like the feature to be toggled on and off in the configuration.

Perhaps you could just add a keyword "ThisMethodNotUsed".

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the original post, but please don’t ever delete the keywords setup from MODx. Its a fantastic way to easily add keywords to individual docs and then slice and dice results in Ditto, ListRelated, etc. Such an easy system and no TVs required.

A toggle display on/off facility for keywords would be great. I think that keywords are a useful facility for internal use, but they are a danger when it comes to uneducated clients. I have spent a fair amount of time explaining that meta keywords are no longer of any real use for search engines.

Maybe another solutions would be some other way of describing them, ’tags’ for instance. They could be used in any way you fancy rather than just for meta keywords.

Good points. I have no idea what the future of these things are, but rebranding them makes sense to me. People could then be free to populate their keywords with them or not as they see fit.

I wouldn’t really say that meta keywords are *no* use to search engines, but I certainly wouldn’t encourage people to spend much effort on them on any page other than the home page and other key landing pages.

The needs of tags and keywords are very different, and the current facility is much more suited to tags (where you would want to use a small number of words consistently) than meta keywords (where you may well want to say "homes" on one page, "houses" on another and "house" on a third, or all three on one page).

The keywords are not used by the search engines anymore but what if the keywords are still there would it hurt the site or search engines/
no
I am done trying to explain to clients that thos keywords are not used anymore, and then I get a anwer back that they still want to add those keywords then I am not the one to disalow and argeu with a client.

I use the keyword for listrelated a lot so would be nice to keep them in place but maybe we could add a userconfig option to disable the keywords tab in the editor.

Dimmy

Definitely don’t get rid of the Description meta tag as that is certainly still used.

I have actually heard that Yahoo! still looks at and considers the Keywords meta tag... you never know when things come back into play. No, they don’t pack near the importance that they used to, but given that engines are far more sophisticated than they used to be, and they’ve downplayed the weight of the tag, maybe at some point it will regain some importance, allowing the ability to include synonyms and related terms to assist the engines for terms that do not actually appear. I’ve already heard that some use this just for that.... but there will never be a definitive answer as whether it adds value or not.

But most would agree that, used in moderation, it probably doesn’t hurt and the value in appeasing clients may be worth its weight in gold.

I’m not a real fan of the current setup though because these should be viewed at the page level, not the site level, so it would be far more valuable to configure and tweak these right from the document page. Currently I use the description tag for my descriptions and the introtext for keywords... but I’d much rather have a dedicated input for that to allow using introtext in other ways, but really don’t want to setup a TV for it... besides, it seems natural to have editing any of this kind of information at the top of the page.

The idea of being able to toggle the availability on / off though should be a happy middle ground for everyone.

Sorry, but I strongly disagree with that suggestion.

The description tag is great for when I want to aggregate content, and I use it in my templates as a sort of sub-header usually.

The meta-keywords may not play a role in SEO any more, but it can be used programatically by plugins to relate similar content easily and accurately. Though I don’t use that type of feature myself, a larger site would certainly want it for internal use. If we remove it, we loose the ability to expand into larger markets.