Bulk SEO, Edit Snippet, Description length validation discrepency -html entities

  • I’ve noticed an issue with the validation of Meta Tag and Twitter Card description lengths.

    Meta Tags descriptions should be no more than 320 chars, TC Description no more than 280. I notice I am getting a red spot validation issue for both of these as I seemingly was exceeding them. However, when I edit the fields, the length below the text entry box placed me below the limit.

    For example: TC Card Desc:

    “These are some of the best San Francisco motorcycle routes I’ve enjoyed around the Bay area, ready to download and check out if you’re in the area. Ideal whether you’re a San Fran biker, visiting and planning a weekend motorcycle rental or a longer trip through California.”

    Length 273 / 280.

    Validation dialog shows:

    Task Details:
    Current: 288 chars
    Description has to be longer than 10 chars and up to 280 chars.

    When investigating this discrepancy between reported lengths, I confirmed the above text is indeed 273 chars long.
    When I check the page source and twitter:description meta tag I see it contains:

    “These are some of the best San Francisco motorcycle routes I've enjoyed around the Bay area, ready to download and check out if you're in the area. Ideal whether you're a San Fran biker, visiting and planning a weekend motorcycle rental or a longer trip through California.”

    Which is 288 chars.

    It seems the additional length is due to the apostrophes being escaped with the HTML entity '

    Question: should the meta description length limits account for escaped characters?
    Should SEO Squirrly be validating the description length with HTML entities decoded?

    This discrepancy is definitely confusing, and I believe SEO Squirrly should be consistent between what it validates and what it displays.

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  • Thread Starter Arthur Yarwood

    (@arfa_)

    Damn, looks like WP forums have evaluated the HTML entitoes I quoted in the text above, replacing them with apostropies…

    In the second passage of test all apostrophies should be -(ampersand)#039;

    Hopefully, you can still see and understand the issue.

    Plugin Contributor Calin Vingan

    (@calinvingan)

    Hi,

    Thank you for your feedback.

    We found the issue with the apostrophe and will fix it in the next plugin version.

    Best, Calin

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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