Weird parsing in Meta Description

I'm having a weird error with META Description. If I include a link in my forum description:

HTML Code:

My own little chunk off the web...well other than HERE. [<a href="http://onederangedneko.com" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">LINK</a>]

it gets munged in the headers and appends part of the link at the top of my page as:

HTML Code:

LINK] One Deranged Neko!" />

Actual source shows:

HTML Code:

<meta name="description" content="One Deranged Neko! - My own little chunk off the web...well other than HERE. [LINK]"http://onederangedneko.com" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">LINK</a>] One Deranged Neko!" />

Is there anything I can do, other than remove the link to fix this?

Hello,

Is that link in their if you temporarily disable vBSEO?

Yes it is. But it's odd because I don't ever recall seeing it happen before I installed vBSEO. But since turning it off didn't change anything, I now concluded it was a template problem.

I moved the meta description tags out of the headerinclude template and into the X-DISPLAY templates. The one for FORUMVIEW needed to be $foruminfo[description_clean] instead of $foruminfo[description] like it was in headerinclude.

I believe it is cleaned because it removes the html. Any reason for removing it from the headinclude template?

It was an SEO tip posted on vBulletin Setup.

Since I see in the vBSEO Style 2.0 it DOES NOT do that, I'm editing my templates to put meta descriptions back the way it were before.

I cannot see how moving it from one template to another would be beneficial for SEO. What was the tip?

Originally Posted by Cerberus

2)Title and description changes

vBulletin handles page titles and descriptions differently then I like.

For starters, the page descriptions do not change from one page to the next. So the description for each and every post and thread are the same. This does not help search engines (or adsense) figure out what a thread is about. You want the titles, descriptions and keywords to be specific to each page / thread.

vBulletin does this in the template "headinclude". We will modify this template first. Remove the following from the template:

It then goes on about what edits to make. The whole thread is @ How to SEO vBulletin without VBSEO

I'd also like to point out that I made the edits PRIOR to getting vBSEO.

vBSEO automatically alters meta tags to include thread title keywords, etc. It's likely an un-necessary modification with vBSEO installed.