title and description meta tags for panel pages

I'm having the same exact issue. Using panels 3. The 'title' tag in the head seems to be empty.. I cannot figure how to have a panel page (admin/build/pages/edit-panel-page/..) show the title in head. I tried adding content with titles and tried many settings, also used the page title module (admin/content/page_title) and setup the Pattern for Panel but nothing is working. The head title works on other content pages.

Help plzz

Good advise, I will try it. I can see a lot of problems though with using views over panels. IMHO it sucks that panels are not handling header title, like panels 2 used to. I hope this gets fixed. Thanks

It seems like you should be asking about that in the meta tags module, not Panels. Panels doesn't do anything for metatags.

As near as I can tell, meta tag info is more or less overrated. Search engines don't really give it that much credit and that's the only thing that sees it. So while there are a few people who care about it, it just isn't something that Drupal supports by default, and it's not something I've really cared too much about.

The page title and description meta tags are very important for SEO. Keywords not so much.

The page title is one of the most important factors to optimise on a page... it shouldn't necessarily be the same as the default pattern throughout the site. It's also the biggest thing a user sees in search engine results.

The description is important because google defaults to it preferentially as the snippet displayed in search resuilts, particularly if the keywords are in it, and again, it's not necessarily the 1st content on the page.

The page title is set by Drupal and the theme layer, there really isn't anything Panels can do about it. This is one reason that there are dedicated modules to do things like that. I realize you think this is important but it's not something that every module can really control without core or some centralized module making it actually work.

moved

it's only now, that I encounter the same problem. Strange that panels seem to be powerful but not really. I just needed to add some tags...

I ran into this problem a few months ago, but found a way around it - here is a quote from a previous post:

"This is no longer a problem for me - I solved it by learning to use panels better...

When using panels node template, all the useful SEO stuff comes from the node, so you can use page title and nodewords coupled with panels excellent layout features...But when using 'panel pages' you cannot add in this extra data...

This seems to be the issue here - for someone only using panel pages to write their content, this is a big issue because there is nowhere to input their meta data etc, but for someone using panels to create templates to display nodes, this really isnt an issue because everything is carried accross from the node including all nodewords and page title data.

For SEO minded people, the best way to use panels is to use the node template/tax template features and set up variants for different content types and selection rules. This is a much more dynamic way of using panels, and also avoids the duplicate content you get when you insert a node into a panel page"

Hope this helps, Joe

PS this was the original issue: http://drupal.org/node/491148

i found a module seems to fix this problem
http://drupal.org/project/nodewords_pagetitle

Instead of all that just use the "custom pages" meta tag option for the nodewords module. This worked fine for my panel page.

Yes, meta tags, specifically the Title and Description tags, are VERY important!

install nodewords module.
then go to '/admin/content/nodewords/custom/add'.
here you can add tags and keywords for the front page as well as for the custom pages.

-Ashish

@ashish.verma85: Do you know of a drupal 7 way to add those? The meta tag module (nodewords for d7) doesn't seem to be able to do it...

Hello.

I D7 go to admin/config/search/metatags there you will find "Global: Front page" override that" and you will be able to put tags and descriptions.

Thanks
Ashish

This is my solution for adding meta tags descriptions to panel pages:

Add a new custom content panel to your page.
Set the text format to php and insert the following:

<?php
$node = node_load(%node:nid); //get node variables
$text = $node->body['und'][0]['value']; //get the body value
$insert = substr(strip_tags($text), 0, 160); //Remove html tags and trim to 160 characters
$insert = preg_replace('/[\s]+/',' ',$insert); //Remove extra white spaces

$meta_description = array(
           '#type' => 'html_tag',
           '#tag' => 'meta',
           '#attributes' => array(
           'name' => 'description',
           'content' => $insert //build meta tag
 ));
 drupal_add_html_head($meta_description, 'taggedy_tag'); //put meta tag in head
?>

This will grab the first 160 characters of the body value and add it to a meta tag description in your head.

Hi,

With "meta tags" module and "context" (by path) it's ok but you must to disable the "page title" module firt.

These modules are in conflict.

^^ thanks besky, that was just the tip I needed about disabling Page Title. Meta Tags plus Context (by path) appears to work great now.