Googled description of your Typo blog not your own? Check your theme.

Bart — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 01:04:00 -0500

Google your Typo powered site and check the description under your page's title in the google results. You might find that the text is actually coming from your theme's pages. The theme determines what the final HTML will look like, this includes any data search bots see. For example, if a site is googled with Leevi Graham's Oragami Typo theme (this happens with any theme, not just this one. I happened to like it), the following description showes up:

"So what are all these buttons for? BartGDev.com..., has many personalition features for you, the reader…"

Well that’s not right. I need something that would introduce my site to anyone scanning the googol to googolplex of results. So here’s what I did.

Choose a unique word from this text to find the file where this is coming from. You can do this by running the following grep command from your /typo directory:

[/typo]$grep –R personalition *

I got a match on 3 files:

  themes/origami/layouts/.svn/text-base/default.rhtml.svn-base:
  themes/origami/layouts/default.rhtml:  
  tmp/cache/META/DATA/ACTION_PARAM/"your_blog_name"/articles/index/.cache:

The first is obviously a subversion entry, due to the .svn references. The second is the actual source of our ‘google text’. The 3rd is part of the cache. I’ll get back to it in a minute. Back up the 2nd matched file (default.rhtml), and with your favorite editor, like pico, edit it. Add this line just after the <title>...</title> tags:

<meta name="Description" content="this text will show up on as a description in a search engine's preview of your site" />

My description was showing the first 160 characters, so something that’s equal or longer than that should be enough. Note that this text will not show up on your site.

After saving, you’ll want to go to your site and check the page source the browser gets (Ctrl-U in Firefox). You might notice that the change didn’t take. Bolucks!!.. Rubish!!!.. Pisha!!!... you scream. Well I say “Uno Momento”. You’re looking at the cached version of this file. This is the 3rd file you found with the grep command. You’ll need to delete it before you see your newly edited page. So go ahead and delete ONLY the .cache file, not directory ( tmp/cache/META/DATA/ACTION_PARAM/"your_blog_name"/articles/index/.cache:). Now refresh your site and check the page source. That’s it. Next time googlebot checks your site, you should have the new description. Enjoy nice Google Results!

Bart

Bart G. Dev...: Googled description of your Typo blog not your own? Check your theme.

Googled description of your Typo blog not your own? Check your theme.