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htmlsearch-enginemeta-tags

Proper usage of search engine meta tags

I'm in a pinch.

I recently (around a month ago) tried to make my website friendly to search engines like google. But as an result, I managed to create exactly the opposite, it seems that my site is not appearing anywhere at google search results after ~1,5months. My header portion looked like the following:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"/>
<title>Company title</title>
<meta name="description" content="Description of the site">
<meta name="author" content="My own name">
<meta name="keywords" content="keywordX, keywordY, keywordZ">
<meta name="robots" content="Index, NoFollow">
... code continues below ...

I tried later to correct my header by changing lang="en" to lang="fi" (because site uses finnish language only) and removed robots meta tag after trying to read more about them here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag

I have problem left to be answered if someone has ever seen similar:

  1. <meta name="robots" content="Index, NoFollow"> - did this stop my page to be indexed even though I have "Index" attribute in place? or was it usage of <html lang="en"> when site is written in Finnish.? I desperately want to get my site headers correctly for now on and hope or request new indexing round from google?

Thnx in advance. - Mane

Solution

    • Keep the language as lang='fi' if you are a Finnish Language site.

    • Change <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> to <meta charset="utf-8">.

    • Drop <meta name="keywords" content="keywordX, keywordY, keywordZ">, It doesn't do anything anymore, and is useless.

    • <meta name="robots" content="Index, NoFollow"> should be dropped, it's basically telling search engines not to both with any of the links on your page, and will be having a harmful effect. If you don't want to drop it, you could set it to it's default value which is <meta name="robots" content="index, follow">

    The rest is fine.

    To check what's going on, search in google forsite:yourdomainname.com, this will show you what is already in Google.

    Then sign up for Google's Webmaster Tools, and add your site. This tells you in depth what Google think of your site, and which pages are in their index as well as loads of incredibly useful information.