What is the 'Meta Description' (meta_description) field used for on a KB article

[kc1959]

Hi,

there is plenty of information around the use of the 'Meta' field on a knowledge article but very little on the 'Meta Description' field - there is no 'hint' text when hovering over the field for example.

I can see that it is automatically populated with the first 100 characters of the article's body text by Business Rules.

Does anyone know the purpose of this field - searching, indexing, SEO etc?

Hope you can help.

[Ankur Bawiskar]

Hi,

refer below blog

Using meta tags in Knowledge Base articles to improve SEO and reduce incidents

Regards
Ankur

[kc1959]

Many thanks Ankur.

But that refers to the 'Meta' field and not the 'Meta Description' field which is 1000 characters long as is populated with the first 100 characters of the article body as mentioned above.

[Lucas Vieites · Accepted solution]

Hi @kc1959 , you have the description of the functionality here: Generate SEO information for articles using article templates. Basically, it's how ServiceNow has implemented the search engine feature (see: https://moz.com/learn/seo/meta-description). 

You can choose where this field is populated from, and it will be used by search engines (spiders, crawlers, etc.) to show and rank your content in their search results.

Kind regards,
Lucas Vieites
P.S. If my reply helped you, please mark it as helpful or correct so other community members can benefit from this information.

[kc1959]

Many thanks Lucas.

That's a lot clearer now.

We don't use article templates at the moment so it appears that this will not be of benefit to us.

Also, I guess I'm beginning to understand that 'SEO' in the ServiceNow context is always going to refer to 'external' search engines (Google, Bing etc.) and not the ServiceNow Zing engine - is that correct?

If so, then all of our Knowledge articles are for internal viewing only and are not open for public access. So I guess it isn't important that we populate the 'Meta Description' field.

I really appreciate your help on this - it's ironic that I didn't find the above articles when I did my own searching 😞