Two SEO cock-ups

Well, I admit it. I’ve made two silly on-page SEO cock-ups.

First, on every page I put a meta description tag with the same text. I’ve since realised that it’s absolutely fine not to have meta description tags but if you do have description tags they have to be unique otherwise Google will often view your pages as being duplicates. This is exactly what’s happening on the site, with only three pages visible on a site: search but thousands available when I ask for the similar results to be shown.

Incidentally, I also found out today that WordPress makes exactly this mistake by default. The solution is to install one of the metadata plugins. However I’m not that bothered about the SEO for this blog.

My second error was on the page design of the member profiles, which amount for the vast bulk of the site. I had the username as the sole h1 title. Now, I do have a nice title field which contains lots of keyword rich text but unfortunately I chose the username which is usually a nonsense word. This will give Google a strong indication that all the profiles are nonsense!

I’ve fixed both problems now but I suspect it will take a while for everything to get properly reindexed.

I think that these two mistakes could explain why on some of my keywords we’re on page one of Live Search but not visible in the first 30 pages of Google.

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