There has been a tiny change to my blog which has had huge repercussions to my site, I thought I would share this tale of stupidity with you as a warning of how little things can snowball into larger problems.

The Issue

There is a line in my theme header file which looks like this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"

Have you spotted the problem yet?  What do you mean you cannot see the glaring error!

That particular statement needs to be suffixed with a “/>”

Big Deal, Why are You Draining My life-force With this Sad Little Detail?

Because I had, for some reason unknown, deleted a couple of characters, my HTML was badly formed and this had a knock on effect which seriously effected my site

The Snowball Effect

The line underneath the content type was my title tag, the badly formed html means that this line was not readable.

The title tag is read by google when they index my site.

All of my content now had the title Subscribe  see the image below.

A few weeks ago my site took a Page rank drop, probably because of this issue, Google cannot ascertain what the hell my posts are about.

There is a very good chance that people are not clicking on my links from the search engines due to this teeny tiny error.

I have probably missed the chance to gain new readers, subscribers and clients.

Bugger, and all for a bloody back slash and greater than sign.

Come On Where is the Moral Lessons In All This Like At The End Of A Disney Movie?

Gather round kids, here is the lesson for the day.

There is a fantastic tool in the Google webmasters site which has been telling me for months that I have 130 pages with missing title tags.  I thought it was talking rubbish so I just ignored it.  Check out the tools at:

google.com/webmasters diagnostics -> html suggestions

So when Google tells you there is a problem sit up and listen.  They are quite good at all this internet stuff.

I’m About To Swear Like Hugh Grant Now, Please Block Your Ears if Easily Offended

Bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, BUGGER!

Exhibit A