Automatic Meta tags generation

[kdnmiller]

Greetings,

this is killing me. Zen cart automatically puts the categories, the product names inside the meta description and keywords. So when i edit the meta_tags.php somwhere at includes/languages i can only add some info to 'Title' otherwise it will all duplicate and bloat up the lines to 500 letters or more with lots of repetitive keywords.

The tag 'site tagline' seems useless since zen cart puts this in the title anyway and that will blow it up beyond acceptable text number.

the tag 'custom keyword': i cannot use anything here because Zen will spam it full with his generated keywords and i cannot switch that off. When i check with some tags checker i have 570 letters there but there should be only 200 max. 570 letters, thats just the tags zen generates on this..

So is there any guide on this? or should i just enter nothing except the title in the meta_tags.php? should i just leave it as it is but it seems the zen tag generation spams the whole tags and will not be good to use with seo and google ranking.. ??

any input or experience on this highly appreciated.

thanks
Mike

[kobra]

What have you defined to allow ZC to bloat this up to +500 characters?

[kdnmiller]

I have around 20 categries with few products in each, so the zen carts puts the categories and the products in the meta tags, thats what makes it so much text..

[kobra]

You can edit the selectors in includes/modules/meta_tags.php

[kdnmiller]

Thanks ! I'll check

[Badvoc]

how do you change the selectors to stop them from doing this?

I have a similar problem,I have a huge list of keywords and a huge site description (basically all my categories)

I want to remove that and to just be able to manually enter my own keywords and my own site description.

[Badvoc]

btw I'm using 1.3.7

and I don't have the following in my includes\language\english\metatags...

define('HOME_PAGE_META_DESCRIPTION', ');

define('HOME_PAGE_META_KEYWORDS'

I know other people just edit those two lines and it appears to work for them but they don't exist for poor me *sob*

in fact this is my entire file:

<?php
/**
* @package languageDefines
* @copyright Copyright 2003-2005 Zen Cart Development Team
* @copyright Portions Copyright 2003 osCommerce
* @license http://www.zen-cart.com/license/2_0.txt GNU Public License V2.0
* @version $Id: meta_tags.php 4273 2006-08-26 03:13:52Z drbyte $
*/

// page title
define('TITLE', 'Gothic Magic');

// Site Tagline
define('SITE_TAGLINE', 'Pagan, Wiccan, New Age - shop');

// Custom Keywords
define('CUSTOM_KEYWORDS', 'Pagan, Wiccan, New Age, Gothic, shop, Jewellery, Reiki, Spells');


// Review Page can have a lead in:
define('META_TAGS_REVIEW', 'Reviews: ');

// separators for meta tag definitions
// Define Primary Section Output
define('PRIMARY_SECTION', ' : ');

// Define Secondary Section Output
define('SECONDARY_SECTION', ' - ');

// Define Tertiary Section Output
define('TERTIARY_SECTION', ', ');

// Define divider ... usually just a space or a comma plus a space
define('METATAGS_DIVIDER', ' ');

// Define which pages to tell robots/spiders not to index
// This is generally used for account-management pages or typical SSL pages, and usually doesn't need to be touched.
define('ROBOTS_PAGES_TO_SKIP','login,logoff,create_account,account,account_edit, account_history,account_history_info,account_newsletters,account_notifications,a ccount_password,address_book,advanced_search,advanced_search_result,checkout_suc cess,checkout_process,checkout_shipping,checkout_payment,checkout_confirmation,c ookie_usage,create_account_success,contact_us,download,download_timeout,customer s_authorization,down_for_maintenance,password_forgotten,time_out,unsubscribe');


// favicon setting
// There is usually NO need to enable this unless you wish to specify a path and/or a different filename
// define('FAVICON','favicon.ico');

?>

[kdnmiller]

Sorry, i dont have the answer for the selectors yet since i had other serious trouble, but for the tags i can tell you that Zen does name them

define('HOME_PAGE_META_DESCRIPTION', ');

define('HOME_PAGE_META_KEYWORDS'


However the standard tags exist as you expect, if you go to your site with IE and check View->source.

Just its so annoying that zen spams the tags with its own generated keywords and possibly makes it difficult for search engines.

What happens is that for example your tag:

// Custom Keywords
define('CUSTOM_KEYWORDS', 'Pagan, Wiccan, New Age, Gothic, shop, Jewellery, Reiki, Spells');

Thats nice, but zen takes that and adds all the product headlines to it, and all the categories. That will bolster it up to double the characters and duplicate some aswell. This is NOT a good thing.


I also wonder this is not a known problem here and nobody screaming out earlier, since the SEO optimizing is probably the most important thing if you want to sell something...

[kobra]

Refer you back to my post #4 in this thread

[Website Rob]

Admin > Configuration > Product Info

You have some Meta Tag options that should help.