Meta Tags

On a web page, meta tags are hidden snippets of information which provide context about your content to machines scanning the text, such as search engines. You can use meta tags to suggest titles, descriptions, and featured images to these automated scripts which they would otherwise needs to guess. To add and edit meta tags, expand this section in the right sidebar when editing content.

The Drupal editing interface sidebar section for meta tags showing the description and the three types of tags: basic, advanced, and open graph.

Depending on which kind of editing account you have, you will see more or fewer options. All levels of editor can change the Page title, Description, and Robots meta tags. These are the only  the tags which Google understands on the page. For each tag, Drupal will use a default value taken from your content and in most cases you do not need to make any changes. These defaults will appear in brackets, indicating which values will be used.

Basic Tags

In this section we will describe the individual tags from the Basic Tags section which editors should know in more detail.

Page title

The Page title tag is used for the display title of the page in search engine results. By default, this will be the title of the content followed by the name of the school. For example: “Admissions | Middlebury College”.

Description

The Description tag is used for the blurb of text which appears underneath the link to the content on the search engine results page, in some cases. The default for this field is the text from the content’s Blurb. For example: “Find out more about applying to the Middlebury Institute.”

Robots

The Drupal editing interfaces section for editing the robots meta tag, showing checkboxes with the various options for this tag.

The Robots tag gives suggestions to search engines for how to treat this content when they encounter it. Most search engines honor these recommendations, but they aren’t required to do so. The default, assumed behavior is that search engines may include this page in their search results and follow links on the page to find other content to include. It is strongly recommended that you do not change this behavior.

If you need to make content inaccessible to the public, either because it is outdated or is undergoing a draft and needs review before being made public, please use the workflow settings rather than changing the value of the Robots tag.

More information

Open Graph

Some editors can change the Open Graph tags for content. These are used to control how the content appears when shared on Facebook. The most common uses of this section are to provide an alternate image URL for the page which is cropped to look best on Facebook. You can also use the Open Graph tags to change the URL for Facebook, allowing you to add snippets to the URL for a marketing campaign.

See the Open Graph protocol documentation for more information.

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Article ID: 255
Created
Tue 2/22/22 3:14 PM
Modified
Tue 2/22/22 3:14 PM