It all began in the late 90’s. I wanted to put some news on my website. A diary. A list of forthcoming events. I started with simple HTML. One page, with sections for every post. Simple.
Then I heard about ‘blogs’ and ‘blogging’. Being smart, I picked WordPress, the most popular software. How clever, I thought. If you get the WYSIWYG editor going, anyone can put up a web site. Very democratic.
This encouraged my to post my outermost thoughts; on politics, London, and personal gripes. As a webmaster, I watched to see Google index them. “Here we go”, I thought, “soon, my jewels of extrospection will belong to the ages”.
Except Google didn’t like my blog. It wouldn’t index much beyond the front page. Why, why, why?
Duplicate content? I set it to put only one post per page.
No improvement.
I looked at what Google was indexing. Then I looked at the blog HTML. Soon, all became clear.
In sum:
– WordPress was still duplicating my content, and
– It had no proper META tags, and
– There was a lot irrelevant HTML, and