hello!
I finished adapting photorama template for my photos and I’m very happy with it.
There are still some things that I don’t understand b/c of my poor knowledge of web.
I went to google console and required indexing but when I did site: gianpaolof. github. io google showed me some results that I did not expect to see, like this:
- gianpaolof. github. io › journal
- gianpaolof. github. io › page2
the journal page does not even exists in my repo on github, it is part of the original photorama template but I removed it. What did I do wrong?
It must be the effect of the pagination plugin but if I remove it from the yaml i get a build error.
There is also something I don’t understand in the tags of the seo plugin:
"[ gianpaolof. github .io/ journal/ page2/]
which is again a link to a non existent page
and the tag description:
“description” content=“441, Emily Dickinson”
is different from the description of the config yaml.
My repo is here:
(sorry I had to break the links because I am a new user and the forum does not allow me to make post with more than 2 links :(((( )
Thanks
Gianpaolo
Google’s search results don’t change instantly. If you press the the “…” next to the /journal/ search result then you can examine Google’s cache. Currently the cache is from March 6th, so the /journal/ page existed less than 24 hours ago.
Left alone, Google will probably remove the pages over the next few days. Possibly requesting a re-indexing of the site or the removed pages will speed it up a little.
1 Like
Thanks.
And do I have to do something for the seo tags?
It looks like there are multiple html, head, and body tags on the homepage, as well as multiple meta-descriptions. The descriptions come from the sites layout/includes as well as the SEO plugin. You’ll need to untangle all that to fix the description issues. The W3C’s validator can help detect markup problems:
Showing results for https://gianpaolof.github.io/ - Nu Html Checker
2 Likes
very interesting! probably the original template has already the seo tags, starting to understand something. thank you 
@chuckhoupt one last question: suppose I want to reach people interested in the topic “mickey mouse” what is the best option? adding “mickey mouse” in the meta description?
I’m not an SEO export, but my understanding is that the visible/textual page content (title, headers, text) is of primary importance and the meta-description is of secondary importance.
For example, the visible page content should clearly describing the “who, what, where and why” of a site:
<title>Mickey Mouse Motors</title>
<h1>Mickey Mouse Motors of MouseTown</h1>
<p>Mickey Mouse Motors provides sales and repairs
of mouse-size motorcycles....
And the description would provide a short summary:
<meta name=description content="Mickey Mouse Motors, motorcycle sales and repairs">
2 Likes
very helpful. thanks again
Indeed. Google looks for words repeated throughout a page for relevance.
Google also no longer reads keywords from a keyword meta field. People abused. And the visible content as said above matters more to Google as you can’t cheat on that (except if you use white text on white background…? Don’t do that)
1 Like
thank you Michael.
For visible content do you mean any visible text?
for example, below my photos I put the name of some athletes and of course I have many photos of my favourite ones: does that mean google will consider these texts for indexing? (the more you guys explain, the more it gets interesting )
Yes google will look at visible texy.
Like headings, paragraphs, quotes…
Like maybe you add caption and figure.
It will also look at title and alt attributes of img tag to see what is in your image.
Of course google can’t read text in the picture itself. But the bots are getting smarter, so maybe one day…
1 Like
is there a priority among html elements or a caption is as much important as a title for indexing?
(that white text on white background is pure evil 
)
I don’t know. There are some things you can know because Google announces them as a factors and some things you won’t know for sure because Google won’t tell us, or won’t say on a detailed level
I don’t know if Google cares more about is your label in a caption element or a p tag. But do what makes sense for users and for structure of the HTML
Bottom line is make your site friendly for humans on desktop and mobile, load quickly, and repeat your important keywords throughout your heading and body. Google changes its algorithms every year or 6 months or something (one is coming in May), but the advice I hear is respect the users (and bots) and Google will like you.
And don’t do weird things like reusing an ID, using multiple H1 elements or blocking elements with other elements. You can detect these and poor accessibility issues using free tools and browser debugging tools.
Also make your site visible to someone with JS enabled. Even though google can render JS, it won’t get nearly as far to crawl a whole site built around JS compared with a site that doesn’t need JS for essential functions.
Search for “crawl budget” on, well, Google. Or your favorite alternative.
1 Like