Hi Jan,
I do not tell you than Google degrade your ranking when you submit too long meta description! On the other hand, all SEO specialists and Search Engines resources explain than you should not use long description. Google in the '
Search Engine Optimization Strater Guide' (page 6) specify about the meta description:
"Google Webmaster Tools provides a handy content analysis section that'll tell you about any description meta tags that are either too short,
long, or duplicated too many times (the same information is also shown for <title> tags)"
If Google Webmaster Tools give alerts about long descriptions, it's probably for a good reason. Yahoo!
limit the description to 256 chars, Bing in the article '
Heads up on <head> tag optimization (SEM 101)' specify: "Keep the description text between 25 and 150 characters in length".
You can read usefull informations about metatags at:
I do not claim to be a SEO specialist, but I try to follow advices and best practices from Search Engine and specialists. This is why you can't use the product description in the SEO features of the Store module. If you really want to use it, I could add it in a future version but why not move the first paragraph from your product description to your product summary?
Here the complete list of SEO tokens:
On the Catalog page when product lists are displayed:
- Meta Title: [PAGETITLE], [STORETITLE], [CATEGORYNAME]
- Meta Keywords: [PAGEKEYWORDS], [STOREKEYWORDS], [CATEGORYKEYWORDS]
- Meta Description: [PAGEDESCRIPTION], [STOREDESCRIPTION], [CATEGORYDESCRIPTION]
Important, if no category is selected, the following tokens return an empty string: [CATEGORYNAME], [CATEGORYKEYWORDS], [CATEGORYDESCRIPTION]
On the product detail page:
- Meta Title: [PAGETITLE], [STORETITLE], [MANUFACTURER], [MODELNUMBER], [MODELNAME], [PRODUCTTITLE], [PRODUCTSUMMARY]
- Meta Keywords: [PAGEKEYWORDS], [STOREKEYWORDS], [PRODUCTKEYWORDS]
- Meta Description: [PAGEDESCRIPTION], [STOREDESCRIPTION], [PRODUCTSUMMARY]
Gilles