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Meta tags

  1. engtech
    Member

    I realize that you don't want to support editting templates because of security issues, but why not allow a section for creating meta tags for your blog?

    There are several services (Google Sitemaps, Feedmap http://www.feedmap.net) that require entering meta-tags on your blog to use their services.

    It should be relatively simple to have a dashboard option for editting meta tags, and to maintain security strip out any quotation characters from the meta-tags when saving to the database (or when embedding in the webpage).

  2. drmike
    Member

    - No search engine uses them anymore.

    - Google Sitemap doesn't require them. (Would love to see where it says that they do. Unless you're thinking of the "nofollow, noindex" bit and we already have that here.)

    - Feedmap does't require them either as they give a manual option to enter the data.

    - Think of the extra stress on the servers with the PHP/ MySQL processing.

  3. nosysnoop
    Member

    I use to do that for my old blog but it became such a hassle and a pain and time consuming that I stopped.

  4. drmike
    Member

    I really think the category tags are of more use now a days instead of the Meta tags.

  5. engtech
    Member

    Heya,

    I found a post by Lorelle that on how to use your RSS feed as the XML for Google sitemaps. http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2005/09/14/submitting-your-sitemap-and-feeds-to-google-blog-search-and-site-submission/

    What is still missing is how to verify yourself as the owner of the site so that you can get access to the Google Sitemaps statistics pages.

    They offer two methods for how to verify yourself as the owner of the web site. You can either upload an HTML file with a name we specify, or you can add a META tag to your site's index file.

    Once you have verified yourself as the owner of the site, the Sitemaps statistics pages give you information such as:
    * Top search queries - list the top queries that return results from your site. Note that this list is unrelated to where your site is listed in the search results.
    * Top search query clicks - the top search queries that directed traffic to your site. These are the top searches that caused users to click on a link to your site.
    * Your pages in Google - the distribution of your crawled pages that are successfully crawled vs. the pages we tried to crawl but couldn't (because of a restriction or error). For details on pages we couldn't crawl, click the link for the error in the Status column.
    * The PageRank of your pages in Google - the PageRank distribution of your crawled pages compared to all the pages in Google's index. Our webmaster guidelines provide more information about PageRank. This distribution is for all pages in your site, so the overall averages may be different than the PageRank of your home page.
    * Your page with the highest PageRank - the page on your site with the highest PagRank (by month).
    * Type - the content type of your crawled pages. We use content type for the File Format search option in our Advanced Search.
    * Encodings - the encoding used by your crawled pages.
    * Common words - words in your site's content, and in external anchors to your site.

  6. timethief
    Member

    engtech - are you aware of these? http://wordpress.com/blog/2006/07/07/new-tag-pages/

  7. engtech
    Member

    The new tags pages look pretty cool

  8. timethief
    Member

    I think so too.:D

  9. engtech
    Member

    Another reason to have meta tag editting support:

    Google supports meta noodp.

  10. timethief
    Member

    @engtech - Do I sense that you feel your blog just isn't getting the attention it deserves and that the situation would improve with meta tags [she said with a grin], or are you suggesting this again and agin from a public service perspective.;)

  11. drmike
    Member

    See the first comment in that post for why this is a bad idea. :)

  12. corlija
    Member

    engtech, impossible to Verify (http://img60.imageshack.us/img60/6224/untitlednb0.png) & also lorelle's link you supplied says to use http://example.wordpress.com/feed/ as sitemap which is also impossible :(

    ok drmike no need for sitemap, but how to "Verify" a wordpress.com site?..

  13. reaperxzr
    Member

    there's no way you can verify your site in google sitemap because you dont have access to upload your verification files nor editing the meta tags, except wordpress using some sort of redirect trick so without uploading the actual verification file your site got verified automatically

  14. drmike
    Member

    Actually I came up with a method, posted it over at the WPMU forums and sent in a pointer to staff. We use it over on the daria.be site. Redirect worked fine. I was actually surprised since I would have thought Google wouldn't have taken a 302 redirect.

  15. compartments
    Member

    drmike's instructions here don't make sense for wordpress members:
    http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=1664

    What "root directory" can I find using my WordPress dashboard? All I can do is create a "page" or a "post." Can you give us a way to work with Google's site verify requirements? They need either a Meta tag posted within the blog, or be able to create an .html file. Neither of these is possible using WordPress's dashboard.

    I thought I could just create a page using the name followed by .html, but WordPress cuts out the "." making it useless for Google's site verify.

  16. timethief
    Member

    @compartments
    Administrators and staff of wordpressMU sites have access to root directory files but we bloggers don't. So to put drmike's statement into context I believe that his reference was to an exchange of instructions with others who like himself at daria.be have wordpressMU sites of their own which they administer. In other words, it was not directed to bloggers like you and me but to administrators and staff of wordpressMU sites.

  17. drmike
    Member

    My suggestion was for WPMu admins not end users.

    My point was that, since WPMU does not support dropping files into the root structure, normally doing the Google verification would not work. I came up with a work around for admins to install for their users.

  18. yusen
    Member

    come posso inserire il file sitemap.xml nel nio blog... e farlo vedere a google? grazie!

  19. drmike
    Member

    Wp.com doesn't support Google Sitemaps. Someone folks have reported being able to use the RSS feeds as one though. You should search teh forums to find those threads.

    Hope this helps,
    -drmike

  20. engtech
    Member

    You can verify your blog for Google Webmaster Console using this trick:
    http://jalaj.wordpress.com/2007/05/21/get-your-wordpresscom-blog-google-verified/

  21. cacaygy
    Member

    how can i add meta tag in wordpress.com?

    cacaygy
    [spam links removed - drmike]

  22. raincoaster
    Member

    I like my answer better.

  23. drmike
    Member

    reported to staff. Moot as they're hosted in ev1server land and they allow it.

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