Webmasters Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for webmasters. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I have a dynamically constructed page that automatically pulls specific page content and applies it to the meta description.
There are <br> tags that end up in the meta description. Should I write the extra code that will remove and store this cleaned-up version, or is it ok/safe/bad-for-SEO to leave the tags there?
I don't think there is any harm in doing this from an SEO perspective as this tag is not used as a ranking factor anymore. As far as Google using it to display the snippet for your pages in their search results, they can choose to simply ignore the <br> tag or choose a different snippet to display such as your ODP description (if it exists) or a snippet of text from your page's content.
Having said that, if you have the ability to remove those tags you should do so. If you suspect it may be problematic, and it serves no purpose in your meta tag (and it doesn't) you should remove it.
strip_tags function.
Aug 27, 2014 at 7:20
If there is a string "<br>" included, it’s exactly that: a string of text (and not an HTML element).
That’s probably not a SEO issue (it’s just text, not different to anything else in the description), but it might be a problem for people reading this description.
Only you can decide if it makes sense for your content’s description to contain such a string. I’d say it makes sense for an article about the br element (like this Webmasters question), and probably for nothing else.
I have inserted a <br> tag on a personal page of mine, and it finally got crawled by Google. And while I don't have any hard data on the before and after rankings, I do have more of an answer on the meta-description => search result snippet:
The tag was removed, and the description was displayed as a snippet; however, it also appended page content after the meta-description. And in a domain-restricted search ('site:*.com'), the meta-description was not displayed, just a bit of page content.
<br>tag to a live site, just to test how the description renders in the search results, but now I'm waiting for the new description to be crawled (2 weeks).<br>to a meta desc?<span> - <p> - <strong>etc etc.>,<are not HTML encoded - is this valid HTML?