I’m starting to believe that meta description tags are no longer worth bothering with. Now a lot of SEO people will throwing a small fit reading this but hear me out and I’ll try and win you round.

Previously I have always tried to add relevant meta descriptions to the majority of my websites and projects to help encourage click throughs from listings within search engines. So for example I would add something like “…cheapest deals on mobile phones…” or something along similar lines to catch the eye and make the listing more appealing. But now search engines are starting to pull relevant information from your webpage and use this text as your description and this has a few advantages.

Firstly if you wrote a meta description all about blue widgets and someone is searching for blue widgets and spots your meta description then everything should work perfectly. But if your webpage also sells red widgets and yellow widgets and people search for these terms then there will be no mention of these in your search listing description. But without a meta description tag the search engines will pull some relevant text from your webpage and will show what would be a more targeted description in your listing. This also means that the keywords in your listing description will be bolded making it stand out more.

I don’t believe that meta descriptions have any weight at all in search engine rankings so I doubt there would be any effect to your positions if you remove the tag. The one thing to make this work is that you have to have good content on your webpage which will provide the search engines with enough information to create a listing description from. Of course in SEO, the first thing you advise a client is to get the content right so this bears even more importance if you are to rely on the method above.

So it is something I will be keeping a close eye on in the coming months and deciding whether my sites benefit from removing meta tags and if it is something I will advise future clients about.

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I’ve got the latest version of SMF (Simple Machines Forum) running on my AffiliStore website and have been using this for over a year now. I’ve had a strange problem in that Google seems to refuse to index the topic (post) pages. If you do a site: search on the AffiliStore forum you will find that it has indexed and cached all the member profile pages and a few other irrelevant bits of junk but no topic pages.

I decided to do a search on Google to see if anyone else has had the same problems and sure enough it seems that this is common amongst SMF users. Now the surprising thing is that when you go to the SMF main website and do a site: search on their community forum, Google seems to be listing their entire topic pages fine, so they seem to be blind to the problem even though people have posted about it in their forum.

Now I’ve looked into it quite a bit, checked the script to see if Googlebot is being blocked somewhere, removed a noindex meta tag which probably wasn’t doing too much harm as it only showed on certain pages you wouldn’t want indexed, tried the rewrite URLs option for a couple of months which again didn’t index topic pages and the rewrote URLs were very poor (along the lines of /forum/index.php/topic,72.0.html – that is just garbage) but the only conclusion I can come up with so far is that unless my server is somehow blocking SMF topic pages then Google doesn’t like the topic page URL format (/forum/index.php?topic=363.0 – is the . before the 0 causing a problem, surely not?).

So now I am trying a couple of other options, because I do love SMF compared to other forums as it is really user friendly and has loads of options. Firstly, I have now added the latest topic posts on the main pages of the AffiliStore website which should guarantee these pages being indexed as they have been brought to within one link of the top level of the website. I have also added a sitemap mod which creates regular forum sitemap and a sitemap.xml which I have uploaded to Google’s Webmaster Tools.

The next step is to just sit it out and wait to see if the above actions finally get the SMF topic pages indexed in Google. I’m not going to give up on SMF as v2 is just round the corner and I’m sure it will be even better than the current version, but it is frustrating as I do have a couple of thousand topic posts that should be bringing in lots of visitors for various longtail search terms.

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It has been a while since I last submitted one of my own websites to Yahoo! Directory but recently I have decided to splash out the $299 on New Football Kits to help push it’s rank for some of the more competitive search phrases such as “Football Kits”, “Football Boots” and “Football Shirts”.

The last site I submitted to Yahoo! Directory was Glass Block Outlet back in 2005 and I instantly noticed the benefits in Yahoo! search engine rankings for targeted search terms and I also think it was one of the deciding factors that pushed the website to the number 1 position in Google.co.uk for the search term “Glass Blocks” (which also helped the site get a listing on the BBC website).

Now people may argue that things have changed since then but recently I have worked on a number of websites which have very poor on page SEO and minimal incoming links but still manage to rank in Yahoo! search results for terms they have no right to. This is solely because they have a Yahoo! Directory listing.

So I have been monitoring the positions of New Football Kits for these popular search terms and the current results are:

The Yahoo! Directory listing should hopefully go live over the next few days so I will report back with the rankings in a month from now which should be enough time for the site to benefit from the listing.

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Hello and welcome, bal4.co.uk is the online portfolio and web blog of Accessible Web Designer and Search Engine Optimisation Consultant Steven Balfour.

This websites details services which I can provide either through hiring me on a freelance contract or as an employee. For details about projects I have previously worked on please view my about me page.

I am currently working self employed as an Affiliate Marketer earning commissions through a variety of product based websites focused in various sectors. I have previously worked as a Senior Web Designer and as a SEO Executive and have successfully developed and marketed websites for both SMEs and large companies/organisations.

As this blog develops it will contain details of projects that I am working on, coding and design tips that I pick up along the way, search engine optimisation techniques which bring results and details of how to successfully market websites through various channels.

If you are interested in any of my services then please use the contact me form and I will reply to your query asap.

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