Bad Meta

I am surprised how high our church website ranks on a google search when there are many other SJN churches and even a wikipedia entry for St. John Neumann. I even logged out of Google so it would not bias the results. I'll give credit to the activity we have on the site with updates and cross-links to and from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

I noticed the description for our site (the description meta tag on the home page) was not the default for the site, but instead one of the articles that appeared on the home page. (See yellow box in attached image.)

After a little digging, I found out that there was a bug in a plug-in I used to generate article meta description tags dynamically called autoMetaDescSEO. I started using this plug-in when we started using Facebook because a Facebook link will attempt to grab the page's description, which at the time was just the default for the website.

So the plug-in helped grab some relevant text from the SJN website page links. What I did not realize is that a bug caused one of the articles on the front page to place a meta description tag there, above the site meta description.

Fortunately Dao by Design has repaired this problem with a newer and renamed version of the plug-in now called SimpleSEO (a much simpler name.) The new plug-in has an option to not have the front page meta description auto generated. Google's robots should have our search result updated within 48 hours...