Blog Suicide: Top 7 Title & Meta Tag Mistakes that Kill Your Blog
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I’m shocked! Not only do bloggers waste time with meta tags although most of them are worthless for Google, bloggers hurt themselves using meta tags. It does not get better it seems it gets worse.
Some people even commit Google suicide by adding “discourage Search Engine Visibility” to their blogs.
When you blog you write for people to find and read your blog so in most cases you do not want to bar them from arriving there. Other people commit blog suicide by telling hackers to hack them.
Awful slow death
Also the title element, which resides in the page head of the HTML document as well still gets abused and wrecked all over the place like it’s 1999.
Blog suicide by title-tag is an awful, slow death but many people choose it anyway.
A messed up title tag will make Google de-index you partly, devalue the content in the search results and finally scare away the remaining users that might have found their way to your blog in spite of all that.
These are the top 7 title & meta tag mistakes that kill your blog, blogging is beautiful, do not commit blog suicide!
meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”
This is basically a “no trespass” sign for Google or in other words Google suicide. You will still get indexed with a URL but you won’t get visitors from Google. Spam bots will still crawl you though.
Not only newbie bloggers commit suicide like that, some “of UK’s most influential online journalism bloggers”, green activist blogs or even SEO bloggers!
meta name=”description” content=”SEO, seo, Seo, SEO blog, seo blog, blog seo”
This is telling Google users “this is spam” and “get off”. Either you do not use this tag at all, then Google displays text from your page.
Or you enter a short and encouraging sentence here, something like “This SEO blog will kick your ass SEO 2.0 style!” ;-)
meta name=”keywords” content=”SEO, seo, Seo, SEO blog, seo blog, blog seo”
This is telling Google “look out, potentially spam”. Meta keywords do not count for Google ranking.
Yet many believe that Google checks whether the keywords contained in the meta tag are also in the page copy. Otherwise you get downranked.
meta name=“generator” content=“WordPress 2.x.x”
This is basically telling hackers “come in”, as WordPress vulnerabilities abound in older versions.
WordPress itself always advises you to upgrade to the latest version at least once a week it seems.
Even your web hosting provider can scan and ban your account when you display it. Delete it!
more meta tags = better
Back in the days I assumed that the more I tell the search engines in my meta tags, the better. The contrary is the case. Google and most others do not care.
They just notice that your page heading is full of useless crap and the real page content is far down so you get downranked for a lower code to text-ratio than average.
<title>Search Engine Optimization And Marketing Blog Offering Tips, Tricks And Links To Make Money Online</title>
Nobody will read that, people will bounce and you won’t rank in Google for any of these keywords besides some bizarre long tail combinations. Keep it short.
The same or almost the same title tag on several or all pages
Consider a post title like this: “New SEO tool”. And then add your blog title like “Search Engine Optimization And Marketing Blog” or longer.
More than a half of the title is the same now so Google will treat the page as very similar to other pages.
Do yourself a favor
You might even end up categorized as duplicate content. This results in one page of the two not to show up in search results.
Also you won’t rank for SEO tool if more than 50% of the title is stuffed with other keywords.
This is really very basic stuff but nonetheless you need to address it ASAP.
You might be a wonderful blogger but if you fail here it won’t be any good. Please do me and yourself a favor!
Do not commit blog suicide do not make one of these 7 title & meta tag mistakes that kill your blog.
Last updated: April 17th, 2018.
* (CC BY-SA 2.0) Creative Commons image by Michele M.F.
Nice post
However I think Google will ignore these kind of mistakes.
Take a bad website with all that mistakes and check it with
http://www.ExactFactor.com
You will see it can get high ranking.
Today in order to spam the site, you should be more sophisticated.
Good points. I enforce all these correctly (to some extent), but it may be time for a review to make sure I’m not jeopardising my rankings!
Sharon: Thanks. Neat tool. Indeed you are right that, as in real life, many suicide attempts fail. The online journalism blog has so many people link to it that it still ranks well, but it loses large amounts of traffic (ca. 60%) due to not ranking for long tail queries based on text found on pages. So the “privacy” does not work either ;-)
Matthew: Thanks for the tip. I didn’t even know that, I thought changing the theme head was enough.
Harry: To be honest you are at least guilty of mistake #6 and #7 also you use the same meta description for all pages, this is almost as bad as having the same titel tag everywhere. Moreover you can drop at least 5 useless meta tags from your head.
It is worth noting that removing the meta generator isn’t as easy as it used to be. Before, you could just omit it from your theme. With more recent versions, it is automatically added by wp_head(). This WP support article has a fix: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/164884
Nice post and a great photo ! The title of the blog is the most important element.
[…] bei onreact.com gelesen: Blog Suicide. Top 7 Title & Meta Tag Mistakes that Kill Your Blog. Da steht als einer der Top Meta Tag […]
very useful. but what should i use instead of wordpress
zrce: MovableType, S9Y, Drupal are some of the best options currently if you don’t like WordPress.
I thought your article was very useful, but I didn’t understand the following line:
“Also you won’t rank for SEO toll if the title is stuffed with more than 50% of different keywords.”
I understand that you are saying make the page titles different, but here it’s sounding like you are saying make them somewhat alike.
Itsme: Sorry for the typo, it must be “tool” of course. Besides that it means that if you want to rank for “SEO tool” yo shouldn’t stuff the title with several other keywords like in “New SEO tool | Search Engine Optimization And Marketing Blog”.
Thanks for the heads up about Technorati de-indexing blogs using older versions of WordPress. WordPress has a new version like every freakin’ week and I’m too busy to update my blog so I got a plugin that updates it automatically for me instead.
kathcom: Indeed, it was cut off. The blog post attempted suicide but I could rescue it from Google Docs.
Thanks for the heads up!
Is the last part of this post missing?
It seems to be cut off.
Good tips and well written! Hardly can’t imagine that people still use things like meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”
Most of the points are also useful with common websites. Thanks!
Great post, Was wondering if its possible to remove the Blog Name as the Default Title tag on Blogger?
If you look at my article pages the title tag starts with the blog name then the article title. http://4cint.com
Thanks
Very Interesting post….I am learning more about dofollow concepts.
thanks for telling us that no follow can harm our blog n aware us about common mistake we do in meta tag for seo . iwas totally unaware from these helped me alot thanks
[…] Meta tags are one of the factors that are responsible for telling search engines what your blog or article is all about. You must not use blackhat tactics like keyword stuffing with your meta tags. I strongly recommend you read these 7 Title And Meta Tags Mistakes. […]
It’s so scary, take care with the meta tags or the sky will fall into your head :D thanks for sharing though.
Just wondering what your thoughts are on having wordpress include the name of the blog in every meta tag of every article. It seems a bit spammy.
Well!Frozi!, you are on to someting with this Post because i was actually wondering for the past 4 days how the hell did i not touch my meta nothinggg, i looked up google for forexice >>>BOUM ! im right there in 3rd, what the hell? so you know what? no Meta nothing for me , lol just let google do it’s job :))
Good Post i enjoyed it highly…
I meant Frozi , sry :)
The image is by frozi not the post obviously.
I find it funny that you tell people in this post to “keep it short” in regards to the title… yet you use a title with 13 words and three special characters for this post.
A shame I couldn’t edit my own comment… hint hint.
“The same or almost the same title tag on several or all pages”
A quick search for “site:seo2.0.onreact.com” shows many of your pages have the same or almost the same title tag on several pages. The title of “SEO 2.0 |” appeared so many times I lost count.
Hey greg, thank you for the feedback.
Indeed this unique post title/headline is long which is not always the best choice. What I meant in the post though is the overall blog title. In my case it’s “SEO 2.0 |” which is quite a short one.
As long as the post title is unique it can be long as well, it doesn’t hurt the SEO too much. In case the blog name/title as long on every page it does indeed hamper your SEO efforts as your post titles end up dominated by the blog title.
As to the repeating titles on my blog: Indeed it’s an issue I neglected but it’s due to WordPress and Google features not to my own choice. I was too lazy to fix that though.
You’ll notice that searches and pagination pages have the default title displayed. Examples are:
http://seo2.0.onreact.com/page/2
and
seo2.0.onreact.com/?s=twitter
The first case is a WordPress and WP Theme issue. You can fix that in the code and make Google not index the pages at all in roots.txt etc.
The search URLs were not meant to be indexed at all but a few months ago Google started to crawl forms and JavaScript. Since then search queries get indexed as well. Here too we can fix the code or ban Google from these pages.
I heard that typepad is going better in SEO. Does anyone tried it?
I see you don’t monetize your blog, don’t waste your traffic, you can earn extra bucks
every month because you’ve got hi quality content.
If you want to know how to make extra money, search
for: Boorfe’s tips best adsense alternative