Review of the Missing Metadata Module

Written by Steve Burge

Dan Rahmel's Missing Metadata module has been floating around the "top rated" list on joomla.org for some months. The module was created as an example for Dan's book Beginning Joomla!, but is it useful as more than a coding demonstration?

What Does it Do?

It provides a small panel for Joomla site admins to see which of their articles lack descriptions or keywords. Without it, you'd need to open and close every article on the site to make sure they have metadata.

How to Install

Install as a normal module
Go to Modules >> Administrator and publish it.
Go to "Home" in the admin area and you'll see the module.

Is it Useful?

Yes, to an extent. I tend rank metadata in this way:

Page Titles: The most important on-page SEO factor
Description: Of some importance, mainly to increase click-through on well-ranked pages
Keywords: Almost no importance

This module won't tell you which pages lack unique page titles, but thats more of a Joomla limitation ... you'll need a third-party plugin for page titles. By finding the pages without descriptions you're likely to also find those that lack titles. So, yes, its potentially a very useful and time-saving module for people wanting to optimize articles after they've published them.

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Your Comments (6)

Stephen Moseley

April 24, 2008

Steve,

I think I've seen you mention before the relative in-importance of metadata. What would be more important? Would quality links to your page be more important than keywords and less important that Page Titles?

I guess I'm trying to determine how things stack up. What would be the most important SEO factor? Domain name -right now- like you mentioned the other day?

Thanks,

Steve

Steve Burge

April 25, 2008

Hey Steve

Its hard to make a comparison between incoming links, page titles, domain name etc but all three of those are right up there as key factors. On the other hand metadata keywords have very little impact.

Take a peek at this full comparison chart:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

guido

April 25, 2008

do I remember well or there was a module capable of automatically extract metadata from articles?
wouldn't it be enough, without wasting time?

Ulas ALKAN

April 26, 2008

@guido: there are plugins which creates automatic meta tags for your site but they mostly creates useless for meta tags fo your site. in my opinion, it's better to avoid automatic meta tags plugins

guido

April 28, 2008

thanks for the tip, Ansiklopedi, but did you consider websites with tens of contibutors? Many of them don't care about populating metadata forms...

Yannick Gaultier

April 28, 2008

Hi Guido. Yes, it happens, but it is probably better to not have any description than a bad one (because search engines will display on their results page the part of your page they find most relevant to the user query). This does not apply for the title, but the title can be more easily extracted from the user input.
Rgds