Imagine this, if you will.
Imagine working on a site where every page is crammed with SEO text. The title of every page on the site, instead of being descriptive, says things like “Cheap Web Hosting, Best Web Host, Dedicated Server”. These are not my ideas, but I am forced to live with them.
Further imagine that you have an embedded site search engine which, believe it or not, uses page titles as keywords.
This is my current reality.
So, if you happen to actually be an interested customer and you type “Dedicated Server”, you get every page on the site with equal page ranking.
I have done a lot to try and fix it. It sort of works now - I had to remove a veritable busload of pages from consideration by the search engine and do stuff to make text in the body of a page get indexed. But that’s not the point of this entry.
The point here is my amazement over how any of this came to pass in the first place.
I inherited a site designed in Eastern Europe, and it has all the lack of charm that such an upbringing brings with it. We’ve slowly been working to make it less goofy but we have a long way to go. More importantly, though, I’ve been working just trying to figure out why anything is the way it is. Why would any web developer deploy a broken search engine that actually fails to search the site and then just leave it that way? Why would anyone leave the Google Analytics tracker broken such that pages take up to 3 minutes to finish loading?
These are mysteries to me. Annoyingly, there’s so many of these tiny problems that I’m often fixing one when someone finds another. Sometimes I get blamed for them and THAT is annoying and frustrating.
