Seo - Web Development Articles

Preventing development and staging sites from showing up in Google search results

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Tue, 03/13/2012 - 17:45

At some point, most developers have found that, despite their best efforts, one of their staging or develoment sites has been found by Google or other search engines. Usually, this is because we must make the work available for preview to the client before the site goes live to the world. Without careful planning, it can be tricky to show a staging site to a client, but not to Google. Do not assume that, because you haven't submitted a URL to search engines, they won't find your site. Take proactive measures to keep your dev and staging sites out of search engines.

Wrangling meta tags in Drupal site to control description in Google search results

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Thu, 03/08/2012 - 11:02

If you've ever been confused by where Google derives the text for search results pages, you're not alone. I was surprised today to find my description in Google had recently changed.

Indianapolis Drupal Development – Search results listing

The text "Offers web application development, content management..." is nowhere on my site.

Google uses a few different sources for the description snippets in search results:

The Art of Linking - Don't "click here"

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Wed, 12/10/2008 - 18:19

Years ago, the W3C made recommendations regarding how to create effective links. It goes against much of what we've become accustomed to seeing on the web. The gist of it is that your links should contain text descriptive of the site or page to which you're linking. They recommend that we avoid using non-descriptive text (e.g. "Click here") or verbs (e.g. "Download").