The metaconfig.xml file is for defining and adding custom META fields for your website. Examples in the provide META file are copyright and the Google bot tags, but there are several other tags that you like to add.
For example if your site is listed on
www.dmoz.org (this is a must in SEO world) Google, MSN and Yahoo can use the DMOZ description and title for certain pages in your website. This is normally not what you want since you have optimize your pages and you want to have the subject title and the summery of the search results based on the specifc webpage. To prevent this you can add beside the Google tag the following META fields:
Google: <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOODP">
Yahoo! <META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOODP">
MSN and Live Search: <META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="NOODP">
This XML file would then be as follow:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<config>
<params>
<param name="html_title" type="text" size="40" default="" label="HTML Title" description="Enter the HTML title tag" value="" />
<param name="meta_description" type="textarea" default="" label="META tag description" rows="5" cols="30" description="META tag: Description"/>
<param name="meta_keywords" type="textarea" default="" label="META tag keywords" rows="5" cols="30" description="META tag keywords, please seperate your keywords with a comma"/>
<param name="robots" type="list" default="1" label="Robots meta tag" description="Set the value of the robots tag">
<option value="index, follow">index, follow</option>
<option value="noindex, follow">noindex, follow</option>
<option value="noindex, follow">index, nofollow</option>
<option value="noindex, nofollow">noindex, nofollow</option>
<option value="0">Don't display the robots tag</option>
</param>
<!-- start here your custom META tags -->
<param name="googlebot" type="list" default="" label="Google settings" description="Settings for the Google crawler">
<option value="">Do nothing</option>
<option value="noarchive">noarchive => don't include in Google cache</option>
<option value="nosnippet">nosnippet => disallow a summary display</option>
<option value="noodp">noodp => disallow a summary from dmoz.org</option>
<option value="noarchive, nosnippet">noarchive, nosnippet</option>
<option value="noarchive, noodp">noarchive, noodp</option>
<option value="nosnippet, noodp">nosnippet, noodp</option>
<option value="noarchive, nosnippet, noodp">noarchive, nosnippet, noodp</option>
</param>
<param name="copyright" type="text" size="40" default="Joomlatwork" label="Copy right" description="Copyright META field" value="" />
<!-- The MSN and Live DMOZ tag --> <param name="msnbot" type="text" size="40" default="NOODP" label="MSN dmoz setting" description="MSN dmoz setting" value="" />
<!-- The Yahoo DMOZ tag --> <param name="slurp" type="text" size="40" default="NOODP" label="Yahoo dmoz setting" description="Yahoo dmoz setting" value="" />
<!-- end of your custom META tags -->
</params>
</config>
In other words the example in this XML file gives you full control of how your pages are presented within the search engines search results (and that is what you want.) I added the Google example because this was somehow a little complex. From my point of view this is a must have for your website. I've customers with large portals who must have full control over the content that is generated. And since these customers are moving (or are moved) to Joomla 1.5 we have released the patch
Also I've been working for around 7 years with search engines implementations in large companies (apache lucene, convera, verity, autonomy, etc..). One of the important aspects on these intranet environments is that you could define custom META tags, for example publisher, department, information domain, etc.. This is a must have.
Regards,
Richard
Joomlatwork
Author
