Yoast not overriding theme meta description

  • Resolved chelseycontier

    (@chelseycontier)


    3 years, 4 months ago

    Hello,

    We use Yoast on many sites that we build and have recently discovered that if our theme outputs a meta description, Yoast does NOT override it.

    We’re not doing anything fancy with the meta description in our themes:
    <meta name="description" content="<?php bloginfo( 'description' ); ?>">

    Our expectation was that Yoast would override the theme’s meta description, optimising SEO outputs, but allowing for a fallback should we need to disable or remove Yoast.

    Could you help clarify why Yoast isn’t overriding the theme meta description please?

    Thanks,
    Chelsey

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Plugin Support Maybellyne

    (@maybellyne)

    Hello Chelsey,

    Thanks for reaching out.

    Just to be sure, do you mean that you use <?php bloginfo( 'description' ); ?> in the meta description field of your posts in the Yoast SEO metabox?

    Thread Starter chelseycontier

    (@chelseycontier)

    Hi Maybellyne,thanks for getting back to me.

    No, that code is in the header.php file of the theme we’ve built. Despite having values set in the Yoast meta description field for various posts and pages on the site, both the theme’s meta description and the Yoast meta description values are rendered on the page, meaning the pages aren’t optimised as expected.

    Plugin Support Md Mazedul Islam Khan

    (@mazedulislamkhan)

    Thanks for your confirmation, @chelseycontier. You’re right, Yoast SEO doesn’t override the theme-specific meta description. Instead, you’ll need to disable or remove the theme-specific meta description completely from the relevant website to make sure that it only has a single set of meta descriptions outputted by Yoast SEO to get a consistent result.

    Thread Starter chelseycontier

    (@chelseycontier)

    Thanks for clarifying that.

    Is there a reason why Yoast doesn’t override theme meta description tags?

    Removing the meta description from the theme leaves our sites with no fallback if we need to disable or remove Yoast. From our perspective, this goes against the idea of WordPress being ‘pluggable’: WP plugins are optional add-ons, even if many (such as Yoast) are advisable for running an optimised site. It doesn’t make sense to us that our themes should omit basic SEO fields in order to rely on a plugin.

    Would it be possible to request that the Yoast team reviews this decision in an effort to allow theme builders to include fallbacks in their themes?

    Plugin Support Md Mazedul Islam Khan

    (@mazedulislamkhan)

    We appreciate you for sharing your thoughts on this, @chelseycontier. While it’s a nice idea to detect the theme-specific meta description by Yoast SEO, it wouldn’t be easier as most themes don’t come with the <?php bloginfo( 'description' ); ?> support but comes with the theme-specific custom settings implementation. So, it won’t be possible to detect them without adding support for those specific themes manually and there are thousands of themes available.

    That said, since it’s a nice idea, we welcome you to submit a proper feature request directly at our GitHub development repository so our development team can decide on this. We actively track bug reports and feature requests in our GitHub development repository.

    Have a great day!

    Plugin Support devnihil

    (@devnihil)

    We are going ahead and marking this issue as resolved due to inactivity. If you require any further assistance please create a new issue.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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