So here it goes I’ll try to be as explicit as possible so bare with me 🙂
The solution is using custom fields and then calling them in your theme’s header.php file…
Here is what I did, I have a lot of posts with 2 and 3 pages and the maximum nr of pages on a post is 4.
On each post with more then 1 page you have to add a number of custom fields. On posts with 2 pages you must add 2 custom fields, on posts with 3 pages you need 3 custom fields and so on…
So on each paged post I added the following custom fields (you can use whatever names you want): metadesc1 (meta description for page 1 of the post) metadesc2 (meta description for the 2nd page of the post), metadesc3 and metadesc4.
Each custom field must contain the following:
<meta name=”description” content=”your meta description for the page” />
So it’s something like this:
metadesc1 custom field = <meta name=”description” content=”meta description for 1st page” />
metadesc2 custom field = <meta name=”description” content=”meta description for 2nd page” />
etc etc
After adding those custom fields to each of the multi page posts you have to add them to your HTML. You do this by calling those custom fields in your theme’s header.php file using get_post_meta function. So add in the header.php file (before </head> ) the following:
<?php if ( ($page < 2) && is_single()) { echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'metadesc', true); } ?>
this adds the meta description on every 1st page of a post
<?php if ( ($page > 1) && ($page < 3) && is_single() ) { echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'metadesc2', true); } ?>
this adds the meta description on every 2nd page of a post
<?php if ( ($page > 2) && ($page < 4) && is_single() ) { echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'metadesc3', true); } ?>
this adds the meta description on every 3rd page of a post
<?php if ( ($page > 3) && ($page < 5) && is_single() ) { echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'metadesc4', true); } ?>
this adds the meta description on every 4th page of a post.
Although it is a lot of work depending on the number of paged posts, the concept is very easy, if you have any issues or you don’t understand something I will help you as this fix was a god send for my website, every user that uses the <–nexpage–> tag should implement this.
Just hours after I did this Google started indexing 2nd, 3rd etc pages of my articles and they appeared in the search results.
To further improve SEO, you must disable the wordpress canonical url function which will stop google from indexing your paged pages.
To do that simply add the following line in your theme’s funtions.php
remove_action('wp_head', 'rel_canonical');
Edit: Maybe a plugin developer will see this and implement all this stuff into a plugin, as I said before the implementation is very easy but there is almost no useful information on how to add custom meta description on paged posts so I may be the first to do this…
Also using this method you can add keywords or any kind of meta info…
What I forgot to mention is that I use All in One SEO Pack but I disabled if for posts with more than 1 page…
