Support Page on SEO Providing Misinformation

  • The support page on WordPress provides misinformation to users. The page tells users that Google no longer relies on meta tags when this is not the case. If you run Lighthouse on a brand new WordPress website, it will receive a lower score for not having a meta description.

    A good question to ask is if meta tags are still necessary. They used to be more helpful, providing important information to the Internet browser. As browsers became more sophisticated, they stopped needing a lot of hand holding in order to figure out if your site is in English or Chinese.

    This is what the documentation from Web.dev says:

    The <meta name=”description”> element provides a summary of a page’s content that search engines include in search results. A high-quality, unique meta description makes your page appear more relevant and can increase your search traffic.

    How the Lighthouse meta description audit fails #
    Lighthouse flags pages without a meta description:

    The blog post also gives the best practices for using meta descriptions:

    Meta description best practices #
    Use a unique description for each page.
    Make descriptions clear and concise. Avoid vague descriptions like “Home.”
    Avoid keyword stuffing. It doesn’t help users, and search engines may mark the page as spam.
    Descriptions don’t have to be complete sentences; they can contain structured data.

    There is also similar documentation on title meta tags:

    Having a <title> element on every page helps all your users:

    Search engine users rely on the title to determine whether a page is relevant to their search.
    The title also gives users of screen readers and other assistive technologies an overview of the page. The title is the first text that an assistive technology announces.
    How the Lighthouse title audit fails #
    Lighthouse flags pages without a <title> element in the page’s <head>

    There are also best practices for title tags:

    Tips for creating great titles #
    Use a unique title for each page.
    Make titles descriptive and concise. Avoid vague titles like “Home.”
    Avoid keyword stuffing. It doesn’t help users, and search engines may mark the page as spam.
    It’s OK to brand your titles, but do so concisely.

    Even though schema is not mentioned in the blog post and Google does not include it in Lighthouse, it is still an important aspect of SEO. A user might take the blog post to be all structured data is unimportant on a website. Google writes this about schema structured data on a documentation page:

    Google Search works hard to understand the content of a page. You can help us by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on.

    Google uses structured data that it finds on the web to understand the content of the page, as well as to gather information about the web and the world in general.

    If WordPress is not going to provide basic SEO in its core such as meta descriptions, meta titles, and schema.org markup and wants users to rely on plugins, it needs to be honest about this. Being honest will help users make an educated decision if they want to use WordPress even though it lacks basic SEO in its core features.

    The blog post gaslights WordPress users into disregarding basic SEO as unimportant when Google considers it important enough to notify users they are not using unique meta descriptions on their pages.
    The documentation should be edited or deleted.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    The Codex is being retired.

    You can find the official and up to date documentation for this at https://www.ads-software.com/support/article/search-engine-optimization/

    Thread Starter deborah86

    (@deborah86)

    @macmanx

    The up-to-date page references the retired page.

    Meta Tags #Meta Tags
    Meta Tags contain information that describes your site’s purpose, description, and keywords used within your site. The meta tags are stored within the head of your header.php template file. By default, they are not included in WordPress, but you can manually include them and the article on Meta Tags in WordPress takes you through the process of adding meta tags to your WordPress site.

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    Thanks! I’ve passed that on to the Documentation Team.

    Meanwhile, the Codex can be edited by anyone with a www.ads-software.com account, it’s just a wiki, so if you’re interested in helping out there we’d really appreciate it!

    And, if that sounds like fun, the Documentation Team, like all teams here (including developers and support), are entirely volunteer, and you can join up by following the info at https://make.www.ads-software.com/docs/handbook/get-involved/

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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