6 replies to this topic

[JeffSmith_NH]

I have run some of my pages through search enging simulators that report missing page titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords.

These are dynamically generated on my site and look like:

CODE

<title id="PageTitle">WeGoPlaces - Lincoln Pioneer Village &amp; Museum, Indiana Historic Sites</title>

CODE

<meta id="MetaDesc" content="WeGoPlaces - Lincoln Pioneer Village &amp; Museum, Indiana Historic Sites" name="description">

CODE

<meta id="MetaKeywords" content="Lincoln Pioneer Village &amp; Museum,Indiana Historic Sites" name="keywords">

Are my tags formatted incorrectly, or are those simulators not picking up the value due to the ID tag?

[chrishirst]

id is an invalid attribute in title and meta tags so is probably throwing the simulator off.

with many non-visible elements the id and title attributes are invalid as are class and style attributes.

[JeffSmith_NH]

But would it throw off the search engines too?

If so, is there an alternative way to dynamically create these tags?

[Randy]

Do the page titles show up in the snippets when you search for your site Jeff? Check that on each of the search engines and it should let you know if they're reading the title or not.

I'm not clear on your question about dynamically inserting the information. The id should have nothing to do with that normally, as it is more of an appearance thing.

What scripting language are you using to dynamically insert the information? There's probably an easy way to remove those invalid attribute if you can give us a quick example of the actual code on the page that is later turned into HTML.

[JeffSmith_NH]

The method that I am using can be found on this post

[JeffSmith_NH]

Do the page titles show up in the snippets when you search for your site Jeff?

Yes!

[Randy]

There's a vast assumption in this statement, however...

As long as the page titles show up in the snippets and long as you see your META's when you view the cache in all search engines you should be relatively safe. I would keep an eye on it though.

The difference being is probably that the real spider are looking for something like <title to determine the page title. And the simulator is looking for something like <title> as the delineation.

The real spiders can often handle invalid markup just fine, often much better than the simulators can. That's why sticking strictly to the W3C standards is not mandatory to be listed.

IMO it's a dicey proposition though, so I would recommend trying to find another method that will lose the id= attributes. You can never tell when one search engine or another will start to choke on this or that markup.

I'm not an ASP - VB.net person, so I can't give you another method. Hopefully Chris or someone else who is equally skilled in ASP will be able to give you an alternate solution.

Edited by Randy, 09 January 2005 - 12:22 PM.