magento cookie text replaces description in google - magento

Quick question, since I've added the magento cookie options in 1.7.0.2 google has swapped my description (the bit of text under main link in search results) for the text that I have in my cookie confirmation box. Not only is this terrible for people that find us through google, I doubt google bot will be all too pleased with it. All my pages have descriptions set but for some reason they are not being used? the cookie explanation text is used instead. Does anyone know how I can change this? or stop it happening?
Many Thanks

I was facing the exact same problem: Google was showing the cookie warning text as description in search results for my Magento store.
The problem turned out to be my Meta description being too short. Solution for me was making the meta description longer, atleast about 150 characters (including spaces).
What goes in your < description > tag is found in Magento's backoffice: system>configuration>general>design, under HTML head, Default Description.
After save, I cleared cache and checked the page source for showing the updated meta. To make things with Google go faster, I used their webmaster tools to submit the store url for crawling. After a little wait, Google was showing the store's description in the search results just like it's supposed to.
Hope this can still help you!
Cheers

Could you paste your cookie confirmation box and how it works, as well as some of your meta descriptions?
Blank out as necessary, just need the gist of the structure.

Related

Ajax Website, problems with History and Seo

I have a few problems i could use some input on.
I have a website, where all the content is loaded with ajax, it works quite well. There are a few issues with that approach though, or some UX issues.
User cannot copy URL from loaded content, since it will allways show the default URL only.
SEO will take a hit, since it cannot be crawled, the sitemap is like 2 pages only, even though when a normal user browses, they will see alot more.
Browser history, back and forward, does not work. Hitting the back button goes to the main page.
Now, i have searched and read alot.
Google has a hack, that seems to allow the site to be crawled, IF you use # in your url, does not work with empty url, which leads me to...
Manipulating the browser history with pushState/popState.
Now, i have tried getting it to work, but i just cant get my head around which process is the best way to take. Should i redo all my ajax?
Right now i have 2 div boxes, and i switch between them with loaded content, to get that nice sweet transition between pages. My frontpage is basically just 2 empty divs, nothing else. It works, but i get the feeling it is a pretty bad way to do it, thoughts?
If anyone know some good guides, feel free to give me, i have as i said read alot, but i might have missed some golden ones out there.
Google does execute some Javascript when indexing and ranking pages. However, text which is not immediately visible to users is demoted when establishing content relevancy.
Manipulating the browser history with pushState/popState.
It is very unlikely Google will trust your content if you need to use those tricks. And content which is not trusted is not ranked.
UPDATE: Manipulating browser history with pushState is ok.
Moreover, if your URLs change all the time, Google won't appreciate it, unless you manage to set canonical links.

Displaying correct joomla website information when posting website link

I was hoping someone can help me fix an issue. When someone posts a link to my joomla created website, they get the heading "Whats New?", which is my default article page for the site. It is the current blog articles written.
For example, if someone posted my link on facebook, it would look like this:
Whats New?
MyDomain.com
Description of website goes here...
Everything looks great except for the "Whats New?". Is there a way to put My webpage name instead of the name of the default page? How about showing an image? When posted on facebook, there is just text and no image used.
Thanks, any help would be greatly appreciated
Facebook uses Opengraph data to build those posts. If facebook isn't offered OpenGraph data, then it will use its own methods to try and find the information it needs. Sometimes with useless results. There are a lot of options to fix this. Joomla extensions has a few opengraph extensions for you to install, some of those should work fine. You can always write something yourself or add the data in your template. But don't expect results right away, because facebook caches those media objects for some time.
Open graph: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/
Joomla Extensions: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/seo-a-metadata/open-graph
There are more ways to fix this, but this is probably the easiest for you. Hope it helps.
Good Luck.
In the Joomla backend, do the following:
Open the menu item the the article is assigned to.
On the right hand side, open the Page Display Options panel
Add whatever you like to the Browser Page Title parameter.
Hope this helps

How to clear Linkedin Share cache?

I have a new description in the page but when I share the page it is still using the old description that no longer exists, I am after something similar like the Facebook Lint.
Any ideas?
You can append dummy query string value to your url and make it look like a new url and LinkedIn fetches it again. I've tried it and it works.
For example:
https://www.codeproof.com/?refid=LinkedIn
where refid=LinkedIn is just a dummy value.
If your url already contains query string and then just append "&refid=LinkedIn" at the end of the url.
Unfortunately, appending a query string to the URL no longer works.
From the following StackOverflow post:
LinkedIn's content cache presently stores website information for approximately 7 days before the crawler will revisit the site.
There looks like there is no instant way to clear the cache, but to wait seven days, remove the media and re-add it.
Appending a query string to the URL no longer works, so you'll have to wait 7 days.
But if you really need to share your URL with the medias you want, you'll have to go with a custom API call.
From the LinkedIn developer docs :
The first time that LinkedIn's crawlers visit a webpage when asked to
share content via a URL, the data it finds (Open Graph values or our
own analysis) will be cached for a period of approximately 7 days.
This means that if you subsequently change the article's description,
upload a new image, fix a typo in the title, etc., you will not see
the change represented during any subsequent attempts to share the
page until the cache has expired and the crawler is forced to revisit
the page to retrieve fresh content.
If you make API calls that directly provide the content to be shared
rather than by a URL that requires analysis, LinkedIn will always use
the values you provide.
Step 1: Visit https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/
Step 2: Enter your URL and click on Inspect, You will see the updated preview image
Step 3: Now try sharing your URL on LinkedIn
I've just found a way to force linkedin to fetch a fresh version of the page. Just create a redirect to your destination page and share the redirect page.
For example:
If your page that you want to share is: http://stackoverflow.com
Create a redirect for a page: https://stackoverflow.com/share-li to go to http://stackoverflow.com
And then share the https://stackoverflow.com/share-li on linked in. This way linkedin will think it's a new page and it'll get a fresh page version.
It's easy to do if you're using wordpress, just install a redirection plugin like this one for example: https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
For wordpress these steps work for me:
In the home page I've removed the featured image and add it as a simple image on the header of the page
I've created a redirect page in my blog like (mydomain.com/social) that redirects all requests to my blog (mydomain.com)
Share the blog again in the social networks and everything will be ok
It's done =D
Unfortunately, there is none as of now. We are investigating what it would take to expose a similar feature. Please stay tuned. We'll announce it on the developer site at http://developer.linkedin.com.

Facebook like or share with dynamic document title

I found this problem all over the net but no answer yet, so maybe here someone solved it ...?
I built a page relying heavily on jquery.address. It's got one index page and the rest loads dynamically via Ajax following Google's /#!/ scheme for crawlable pages. Now I want to add Facebooks Like or share button but I can't get it to grab the actual page title or url.
Whatever I do, it always falls back to title and url of the index page. It tried:
(obviously) changing title an openGraph meta on load of the new parts.
"linking" the crawler page (?_escaped_fragmet_=xyx) but specifying the #! page in meta
"sharing" with a given title and url.
I never get anything but a link to the index page or a blank "share" to the right url with title and thumbnail ignored.
Has anyone got a similar setup working?
Thanks for any hints,
thomas
Facebook is actually using #! now and it works! If you build your site so that http://site.de/?_escaped_fragment=something is identical to http://site.de/#!/something all you have to do is "share" the #! url and it'll display the info from the escaped fragment page.
Use this URL to check: http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug
But: A much cleaner solution to the problem can be found here: http://github.com/browserstate/history.js/wiki/Intelligent-State-Handling
My guess would be that Facebook's crawler doesn't run Javascript and will always display whatever's actually in the page it gets from the server.
Facebook share has a BRUTAL cache, last time I checked it was impossible to change the title / description data once it was scraped :(
The issue I had was the og:url and the actual url of the page did not match. I also read a number of comments about the og data being just after the title element, but I don't think that solved anything.
With regard to issues of caching, it is true that Facebook's caching is "brutal", but it does not cache anything for the lint tool: http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug.
I use no-hash-bang urls when sharing links. I process the hard links and redirect them to a hash bang client side using javascript. That way if a crawler goes to the hard linked page it will display the information just as it would if javascript were enabled.
Compare:
http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http%3A%2F%2Flikeapage.com%2F%23!%2FChristmas%2Fvs%2FBacon
and
http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http%3A%2F%2Flikeapage.com%2FChristmas%2Fvs%2FBacon
Hope this helps.

HTML codes showing in viewpage HTML data

I’m a new to Codeigniter. Just using it in my project from last 2 months. I’ve a comment section in my project. Where any one can give comments. Every things are going perfect but when ever any one putting HTML content(image/videos) & then when those are showing back in the comment section… direct HTML codes are showing in the comment page rather than HTML content(image/videos).
ex: when i’m saving any “embed youtube video code” in the comment box & save that the out put comes as “raw Embed Video codes” rather than Youtube Video…..
I feel like it must be a minor thing but really can’t understand where the fault has occurring. Plz, if any body have the solution reply me back as soon as possible.
Couldn't one devise a system where somebody just posts the youtube link itself and through a combination of regular expressions your own system generates the object/embed code itself so there's no security risk possible?
I had a similar problem a while back - wanting to give end users the ability to post YouTube videos, but not allow them to just post anything without some sort of XSS protection.
I ended up using htmlpurifier - http://htmlpurifier.org/ to filter the contents being submitted in the form.
There is a modification that can be made to the whitelist that allows YouTube code through the purifier.
http://htmlpurifier.org/docs/enduser-youtube.html
So far, that's working well, but my system is still in development.
As a quick hack you can do htmlspecialchars_decode when displaying the comment in your view. This is very dangerous though without the use of sanitization when you receive the comment - search xss_clean on this page. You should also use strip_tags to remove all the HTML tags you don't need (everything except the video tags) prior to inserting the comment in the database.

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