A TRUE meta content and meta description hack?
 

I was messing with the meta content and meta description of my forum and came up with this idea that would be really cool.

Would it be possible to make a hack that would grab the contents of the first post in a thread and make that the description of the page and then grab text from the entire thread... or at least the first page of the thread as the content/keywords. I was thinking you wouldn't want small words like "a" and "the" and "was" etc. so I was thinking, if the hack could some how strip out words that were... say 4 letters or less and not put them in that would be great. I believe this would not only rank you higher on search engines, but it would mean that when people searched for something and your forum or post/thread came up it would ACTUALLY BE WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR! Instead of a single list of keywords to fit your entire forum. Is this possible? If there is a hack that already does this or close to it PLEASE let me know as I am looking for something like this.

Thanks! If you to would like to see this hack or have input on the idea, please post in here. The more times it gets bumped to the top the more it will be seen by the hackers. :classic:

Bump!

Bump!

This is exactly what I was thinking. I did a search and found this post. Any ideas on how to achieve this, please?

I'll try it.

Hey filburt, did you finish it/working on it?

If not, or if you wanna co-dev it, I'd love to!

let me know

Any news on this? I just noticed that my forumdisplay.php threadlist pages don't have any meta descriptions at all, and that has to be bad for search engines...

For my forumdisplay pages I don't mind using the forum description as the description. But for each showthread page I can't find a way to include a dynmaically generated meaningful description and keywords.

What would be nice would be to pull so many characters of the first post as the meta description for the showthread pages. Including a meta description tag generated from the text of the thread would help some search engines to include a better descriptoin rather than text like "click here for your user cp, click here to register, click here to search the forums" as the description for any threads they list.

For showthread, it is trivial to use the thread title as the description. Keywords are the tough part.

Amy

I need this mod too. In vBulletin there is an option that read the preview thread with maximum number of words:

"When you mouse-over a thread link a small hovering windows appears that shows the content of the first post in the thread. This setting is the maximum number of characters to show."

I would to insert this content in meta descriptions.

What I have to do? Some mod?

Thanks for answers.

P.S. I have vB 3.6.8

I do beleive this is now default in vBulletin.

I have the 3.6.8,

In meta descriptions I have only the Title.

If $thread[preview] could be called into the SHOWTHREAD template, I would put it to work!

i've gotten <h2 class="myh2">$foruminfo[description]</h2> to work in the showthread template, but to use $thread[preview] instead, you apparently need to mess with showthread.php like they do in forumdisplay.php.