Set description meta tag

Question

I have recently added the following line of Javascript code to a few pages on my site, in order to pull the title tag from the H1 element with the CSS class of "Category-H1".

document.title = document.getElementsByClassName("Category-H1")[0].innerHTML;

I am curious, can I do something similar to pull in the description tag using JS from my H2 element?

Solution

This is doable, but I'm not sure if it would accomplish what you're hoping for. Most people use meta description tags for SEO purposes, but many (most?) search engines won't recognize the description if it is set by JavaScript after the page loads*. Still, if you want to do this:

var meta=document.getElementsByTagName("meta");
for (var i=0; i<meta.length; i++) {
    if (meta[i].name.toLowerCase()=="description") {
        meta[i].content=document.getElementsByClassName("Category-H1")[0].innerHTML;
    }
}

Hope this helps!

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experience

Comments

[Alex Ritter]

You are right. I know it's not the proper way to add a title tag, but unfortunately for me, the pages are generated dynamically using asp.net, and while the module generating the pages does support adding html content, and url keywords, it does not support adding meta tags.

[Alex Ritter]

After doing some research, I found this blog post ifinity.com.au/2012/10/04/… Anything in the title tag is better than nothing, right?