Having been hit by Google's Penguin, I did some checking on my site and thought I had righted the wrongs, but yesterday I discovered two glaring errors that affected the whole site and caused it to look spam-my, and may well have contributed to the problems I've had recently with SERPs.
It's unlikely that anyone reading this will have had the same issues, but they serve of good examples of how easy it can be not to see the obvious. But if you believe that everything is ok then you may not be looking for trouble, and signals that it is there can be overlooked.
Anyway, yesterday I was in Google Webmaster Tools and for some reason decided to look at the HTML improvements section.
I should explain that my site is based on "open realty" which is a complete installation for a real estate site. So I didn't build it, I customized it a lot but that was mainly from within the available editors, I haven't done huge amounts of messing around with code so I didn't expect any problems. But what it showed me was that I had 184 pages with the same title.
Now this was very wrong, because the editors allow me to enter an individual title for each page, and that's what I'd done. This made me dig further, and a separate tool showed me that I also had a large number of duplicated H1 tags.
I contacted the suppliers of the software and even though I have the free version and they don't officially support it, they were very helpful.
I had identified that my logo at the top of each page carried an H1 tag, which meant that every page had the same H1 regardless of what the topic of the content was. This was just something that was inherent in the template.They pointed me in the right direction and I worked out how to remove the tag, and was then able to give each page its own H1.
For the problem with the title, they explained that the system was set up so that it would be assigned through the WYSIWYG editor when I set each page up. But when I checked my pages, instead of it being a title it was an H2 header. The title was the duplicated one I'd picked up on in GWT. So they explained that if this was the case, I must have over-written the command in my main html.
I was frankly skeptical about this because I couldn't see why I would have done that, but when I checked it was exactly what I had done! It took moments to delete the title I'd entered and replace it with the correct command, so that straight away all my pages had their own titles.
I'll give an example to show what effect this all had. One of my pages is about the local weather, but until I fixed it yesterday you wouldn't have known it (or google bot wouldn't, which is significant) because this is how it was set up:
Title: Property in Altinkum Turkey | Turkish properties | Altinkum homes
H1: Altinkum Property For Sale
As you can see, there was no mention at all of the weather! Although it was unintentional, I had made a page look like it was spam. And not just this page, all of my inner information pages were the same.
I should point out that the H1 issue had been there since the site was launched, I don't know when I made the error with the title but it would definitely have been before Penguin, which hit my site hard. Prior to the update, a search for Altinkum Weather, (even with these errors) showed my page at #5, afterwards it wasn't in the top 100. I can't believe it is coincidental.
Anyway, now I have made the corrections and the page is set up like this:
Title: Altinkum Weather
H1: The Weather in Altinkum, Didim
I'm sure you will agree that these are now relevant to content which is all about the weather!
Now its just a case of sitting back and waiting until my site is crawled again, and seeing what effect this is going to have. I don't think the H1 issue by itself would have been a major problem, but having a wrong title is pretty serious and combined with the H1, even more so.
The moral of this story is that just because something should be ok, it doesn't mean that it is and it can be worth looking at things in greater depth to prove it one way or the other. Also, we are human and we do sometimes make stupid mistakes.
It's unlikely that anyone reading this will have had the same issues, but they serve of good examples of how easy it can be not to see the obvious. But if you believe that everything is ok then you may not be looking for trouble, and signals that it is there can be overlooked.
Anyway, yesterday I was in Google Webmaster Tools and for some reason decided to look at the HTML improvements section.
I should explain that my site is based on "open realty" which is a complete installation for a real estate site. So I didn't build it, I customized it a lot but that was mainly from within the available editors, I haven't done huge amounts of messing around with code so I didn't expect any problems. But what it showed me was that I had 184 pages with the same title.
Now this was very wrong, because the editors allow me to enter an individual title for each page, and that's what I'd done. This made me dig further, and a separate tool showed me that I also had a large number of duplicated H1 tags.
I contacted the suppliers of the software and even though I have the free version and they don't officially support it, they were very helpful.
I had identified that my logo at the top of each page carried an H1 tag, which meant that every page had the same H1 regardless of what the topic of the content was. This was just something that was inherent in the template.They pointed me in the right direction and I worked out how to remove the tag, and was then able to give each page its own H1.
For the problem with the title, they explained that the system was set up so that it would be assigned through the WYSIWYG editor when I set each page up. But when I checked my pages, instead of it being a title it was an H2 header. The title was the duplicated one I'd picked up on in GWT. So they explained that if this was the case, I must have over-written the command in my main html.
I was frankly skeptical about this because I couldn't see why I would have done that, but when I checked it was exactly what I had done! It took moments to delete the title I'd entered and replace it with the correct command, so that straight away all my pages had their own titles.
I'll give an example to show what effect this all had. One of my pages is about the local weather, but until I fixed it yesterday you wouldn't have known it (or google bot wouldn't, which is significant) because this is how it was set up:
Title: Property in Altinkum Turkey | Turkish properties | Altinkum homes
H1: Altinkum Property For Sale
As you can see, there was no mention at all of the weather! Although it was unintentional, I had made a page look like it was spam. And not just this page, all of my inner information pages were the same.
I should point out that the H1 issue had been there since the site was launched, I don't know when I made the error with the title but it would definitely have been before Penguin, which hit my site hard. Prior to the update, a search for Altinkum Weather, (even with these errors) showed my page at #5, afterwards it wasn't in the top 100. I can't believe it is coincidental.
Anyway, now I have made the corrections and the page is set up like this:
Title: Altinkum Weather
H1: The Weather in Altinkum, Didim
I'm sure you will agree that these are now relevant to content which is all about the weather!
Now its just a case of sitting back and waiting until my site is crawled again, and seeing what effect this is going to have. I don't think the H1 issue by itself would have been a major problem, but having a wrong title is pretty serious and combined with the H1, even more so.
The moral of this story is that just because something should be ok, it doesn't mean that it is and it can be worth looking at things in greater depth to prove it one way or the other. Also, we are human and we do sometimes make stupid mistakes.
