Something is off with the meta descriptions on sites generated with ghost. It doesn’t render the desired markup, instead, it renders some text from the beginning of the post or page. Curiously, the meta description goes correctly into the twitter and facebook opengraph fields.
To reproduce:
Write a post or page. Enter text in the meta data fields. Add Meta title and Meta description (“This is the Meta description.”). I’m leaving Excerpt and the Twitter and Facebook cards untouched.
Publish. Check the rendered html:
All renders as it should, fx “headline”: “This is the Meta title.”, except for the description which goes like “description”: “This is the h2 heading.\nHere’s some text.\n\nHere’s some more text.”,.
In other words, the description just grabs the initial text from the post. Like I mentioned the twitter and facebook descriptions work fine: meta name=“twitter:description” content=“This is the Meta description.”.
No, it doesn’t work fine, does it? I was talking about the schema markup part. To reproduce:
Open the page you linked to. On Safari, right click and pick “Show Page Source”. Then, check the meta description part. It shows:
},
"keywords": "Fables, Fiction",
"description": "An American businessman took a vacation to a small coastal Mexican village on\ndoctor’s orders. Unable to sleep after an urgent phone call from the office the\nfirst morning, he walked out to the pier to clear his head. A small boat with\njust one fisherman had docked, and inside the boat were several large yellowfin\ntuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish.\n\n“How long did it take you to catch them?” the American asked.\n\n“Only a little while,” the Mexican replied in su",
"mainEntityOfPage": {
"@type": "WebPage",
"@id": "https://demo.ghost.io/"
}
That’s not how it’s supposed to be, is it? “description” should be what had been added in the Meta data description field, in this case “There are many ways to think about business, but sometimes we miss out on the voracity of life by obsessing too much over financial growth.” (This I could tell by checking the twitter or facebook description markup).
Or am I totally misunderstanding how things are supposed to work?
No, you were not talking about the schema markup part. You specifically said “meta description” - so you were talking about the meta description, not the structured data.
In my screenshot I highlighted the meta description: which is being correctly set, as intended.
The structured data “description” field is not in any way related to the meta description.
