With a standard Joomla installation, the meta tags for descriptions are easily changed within articles. The general meta description is established in the Global Config area.

A problem that I have noticed for a long time, (and have been meaning to address), is the inability to change the meta description for categorys and contacts.

This causes a problem for Google it would seem as when you go to Webmaster tools, they report pages where the meta description is duplicated. There are extensions to facilitate the editing of meta tags for these pages, but is there any way of doing it within the standard Joomla install?

Even K2 doesn't address this issue with its categories, so if you set up a blog on the site using K2, it will show the global meta description on the main blog page, but obviously the posts will carry their own.

Cheers,

Only way around it is with sh404sef.

Default Joomla, K2 etc etc doesn't do anything about it.

I usually leave the meta description and keywords off in the global config. I figure duplicate keywords and descriptions are worse than no keywords or description.

Peter

Thanks Peter. That's what I was afraid of. I wonder if sh404SEF will purge the meta description as well as the URLs..

Anyway, all done now except for XMap. Because the url doesn't begin with index.php, you can't even enter it as a custom URL in sh404SEF.

Cheers,

With XMap and Sh404Sef you have to do it manually.

Go in to the advanced settings and disable SEF URLs for the Com_xmap.

This will stop SH404Sef from creating the /component/com/blah blah bal/xmap/view/etc

Now that you have the index.php?variables version you can create a custom SEF in sh404SEF.

Insert the old, create the new e.g. sitemap.html, add in the metadata and you're done!

Peter

Nice! You got some Karma for that mate!..

Cheers,