Q’s about Meta Description

Hi there,
I have two questions about how Yoast displays meta descriptions.

If I do not enter a description, is the <meta name=”description”> tag NOT added? It seems that only the <meta property=”og:description”> tag is added if I have not set a description for a post/page (or set a template to use for the description in Yoast settings) – is the correct?

Secondly, in the above case, where I don’t set a description, the description length is 255 characters by default. This causes my SEO software (Web CEO) to flags all these pages (and posts) with the following warning:

Shorten your Description tag to 160 characters (including spaces), because longer Descriptions will be cut off on the search results pages.

How do I get around this??? The only way I see being able to fix this is to set a generic template for all posts/pages eg “%%title%% will help you find and buy the XXX. Contact %%sitename%% to order your XXX today!”

This doesnt seem very good to me.

Why does Yoast not just take the first content on the page (160 characters by default), add it in <meta name=”description”> tag and then ALSO have a setting where we can set the character length that we want it to show for the desc on all posts/pages???

• This topic was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by ignitionmedia.
• This topic was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by ignitionmedia.

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