Hello!
If no content can be acquired from the page by TSF, search engines can assess your pages and generate a description for you. See https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/snippet#how-snippet-created.
The problem with Themeco’s Cornerstone is that it uses WordPress shortcodes. These were never meant for page builders but only for small snippets users can insert. This created problems for many developers (and it’s why you’re facing this issue), so the Gutenberg project was launched in pursuit of eliminating shortcodes altogether.
TSF will normally warn about this and say: “A page builder is used that renders content dynamically, so no description can be generated for performance and privacy reasons. Consider providing a custom description.” But it doesn’t detect Cornerstone as such a builder yet.
Still, it is possible to feed the content from any source to TSF directly using filters. However, since Themeco Cornerstone isn’t Open Source software and has no public API for third-party developers, I wouldn’t know how to attain this. I’m actually quite surprised other SEO plugins can extract data, but perhaps Themeco has already added support for those.
Please contact Themeco and link to this topic. They need to provide a filter for the_seo_framework_description_excerpt.
We have one written out right here, and it only needs a couple of adjustments. Namely, is_product() should become is_singular(), and $excerpt on line 29 must be populated with Cornerstone’s parsed content.
Still, adding such a filter may result in your site becoming twice as slow. If Cornerstone doesn’t cache the content’s generation, it must generate it twice: Once for TSF’s description and once for display to your visitors. So, you may be better off having no automated descriptions and leaving the generation up to the search engines.
