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I am writing this post as a result of my lack of due diligence. I am usually good at checking the important parts of a website to make sure everything is working and correct, but this little tiny thing that I forgot to check, went unnoticed until today.
So here I am, testing out some search engine ideas for my website, and I noticed in Google search that the description for howbits was way off, in fact it was nothing like what I had put into the all in one SEO plugin. So off I go, back to my website to investigate this weird issue and come to find out, when I changed website design I had forgotten to remove the default meta description and keyword code for the theme.
I learned that, all in one SEO loads it’s meta tags after the themes header information, so if a meta tag is used before all in one SEO meta tags, the first meta tags are shown and not the later ones. As a result all in one SEO description was not showing up, and my website description was the default blog description.
So for anyone who has a Wordpress website, who uses themes, and the plugin All in one SEO, you may want to follow this list of what to remove out of your themes header file.
1. Log into Wordpress and go to the admin / backoffice area and click on the presentation tag. Then click Theme editor, and then header on the right hand side of the screen.
2. Remove these meta tags. I also included a few other meta tags after step 3, that everyone should remove from their website. I have seen some templates with these meta tags that actually work against your search ranking results.
<meta name="description" content="">
<meta name="keywords" content="">
(Let All in one SEO use it’s own tags, you do not need the tags in the template. If you want to test it for yourself, remove the tags, load you website, goto view and page source, and locate, <!– all in one seo pack –>, you will see your meta info that you entered into all in one SEO.)
3. Check your header file for these other useless meta tags that you should never use. I have noticed that some Meta tag generator web services put some of these in.
Useless tags everyone should remove, some will actually hurt your search ranking.
<meta name="Revisit-After" CONTENT="">
<meta name="Robots" CONTENT="">
<meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache">
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE">
<meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache, must-revalidate">
<meta name="Expires" CONTENT="">
<meta http-equiv="reply-to" content="me@domainname.com">
<meta name="resource-type" content="document">
<meta name="classification" content="Internet">
<meta name="distribution" content="Global">
<meta name="rating" content="General">
<meta name="doc-class" content="Completed">
<meta name="generator" content="">
<meta name="classification" content="">
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true">
<meta name="copyright" content="">
<meta name="author" content="">
<meta name="doc-type" content="Web Page">
<meta name="doc-class" content="Published">
<meta name="doc-rights" content="Public">
Now that you are done cleaning up your website, doesn’t that feel better knowing that this will make your website smaller and load faster. Alright, it will not make that big of a difference,but anything helps, at least now you will not have useless meta tags that search bots will no longer have to sort through.
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2 Comments
While I agree with most of these, there are some that I question your claim about hurting your PageRank. Where did you find the information that doc-type and other meta tags are harmful to PageRank? Just curious.
That why I said some will actually hurt your search rank, not PageRank. It a list of useless meta tags that you don’t need for your website, so while people were in there changing the tags on their website they might as well remove these.