Let’s say the excerpts are not shown anywhere on the page!
Are they still visible to the search engines or is it totally pointless setting them up?
Thanks.
The excerpt is used to help populate search engine results and how your site appears when shared on social networks like Twitter.
If you don’t explicitly set an excerpt, then Ghost automatically generates one from the first portion of your content.
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I guess that’s a yes, right?
What would the difference to the “Meta data” section be?
Thanks.
Because search engine optimization is such a complex issue (and there are more important factors to consider like the overall quality of your content), I think it’s hard to say one way or another. I just wanted to say what it would affect without a doubt.
The meta section allows you to determine these values apart from your excerpt. For example, let’s say you want a custom excerpt to show up in your theme, but you want to display something different in search engine results or across social networks. The meta section allows you to fine-tune all of these fields.
So if I set the excerpt it will be the meta description but if I set the meta description it will overwrite the excerpt as a meta description? Same applies to the title? Title is going to be used as meta title but if meta title is set meta title takes over?
That’s right. Ghost uses the meta data if explicitly set, or tries to fall back to something reasonable (i.e. title,excerpt) if it is not.
Ok, I see, thanks for your response