Hey,

Adding /co/ to your robots.txt will sort this out long term and you can remove these pages (or at least hasten the removal of them) in Google Webmaster Tools.

I have seen this approach before where a 302 page is used as a proxy to do some processing and then forwards on to something else. Not ideal from a Search perspective as this is a temporary redirect being used in a permanent situation.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey Dan

Ultimately, I don't think this would be a problem on an otherwise non spammy site. There is generally a big difference between a site that is using a set of spammy or manipulative techniques and one that makes a simple mistake like this so I doubt you have much to worry about if everything else is as it should be.

That said, I guess the simple question here is:

If you are using a background image and white text, why not use a background colour as well?

This would address the obvious usability issues relating to the image not displaying and clarify that there is no bad intention here to trick anything. Better for users, better for search engines, better for your SEO penalty related anxiety issues.

Hope that helps.

Marcus

You too man!

In Google Chrome:

1. Right click on the page in question and select: View page source

2. Search for <title></em> to see your title</p> <p>3. Search for <em><span><meta </span><span>name</span><span>="</span><span>description</span><span>"</span></em> to see your description</p> <p>Shout if you get stuck!</p> <p>Cheers<br />Marcus </p></title>

If you are using the SEO plugin it allows various variables in the title templates. So, to use the page / post title and the site name you would use:

%%title%% | %%sitename%%

To use the title and the site description you would use:

%%title%% | %%sitedesc%%

If you wanted title, site name, site description

%%title%% | %%sitename%% | %%sitedesc%%

If you go to the help tag under the Titles & Meta's section you can get a full list of these variables you can get to customise your template titles.

But, the plugin also allows you to customise on a page by page basis in the page / post settings which is also really useful.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey, page title looks fine, no meta description though by the look of things?

Hey Daniel

Hard to say without a link but the first thing I would do would be to disable the plugin and see if that puts things right. If that does not work, the plugin may have some incompatibilities with your theme or your theme may have some problems itself.

The Yoast plugin has some configuration that allows you to force the rewriting of the titles so you can check to see if that is enabled on the titles and metas page (and try turning it on / off).

Ultimately, this is likely a theme conflict and many themes have their own SEO settings that may need to be disabled or removed so I would look there firfst.

Can you post a link?

Marcus

**Hey, this is exactly right: **chase the marketing, not the algorithm

If you search around your topic and find frequent forum listings in the search results then get in on those pages and help out and that link back to your site is some good solid branding that will drive referral traffic.

On the flipside, if someone stumbles across that post and you have chipped in with:

"Yes, very good information, I am thanking you muchley"

And have a signature like

Keyword Spam | more Keyword Links | Blarghh SEO Puke

Then all you are doing is indicating to Google that you are trying to manipulate the results for those keywords so you will likely do more harm than good.

The spammy link algorithm aspects like Penguin are only going to get more aggressive so as Corey said above: chase the marketing, not the algorithm!

Marcus