Handsome Logic

Barry over at Search Engine Land outlined how every Tom, Dick and Jane can get themselves a free, non-nofollow link on Wired.com’s “How To” Wiki. The wikis (howto.wired.com) are powered by Socialtext/TiddlyWiki, and the articles are, in fact, indexed by Google.

However, the first substantial block of non-code text in the source of every Wired.com wiki page is… code. This makes for some rather unfortunate descriptions in the SERPs:

That’s the description for, from what I saw, every wiki page on the site. Certain other pages that involve parameters (such as index.cgi?action=search) don’t display code for their description, but don’t display anything useful either.

The code that’s being displayed as a description is part of a textarea tag for a form object. The problem, of course, is that while this code displays properly on the wiki for visitors, the search engines read it as-is.

<textarea id=“st-tags-tagtemplate” class=“st-jst-template”>{for t in tags}
&lt;li class=&quot;st-tags-tagline st-page-box-listing-entry&quot;&gt;
&lt;span class=&quot;${t.level}&quot;&gt;
&lt;a href=&quot;?action=category_display;category=${t.name|uri_escape};tag=/${t.name|uri_escape}&quot;
class=&quot;st-tags-tagline-link&quot;&gt;${t.name}&lt;/a&gt;
&lt;/span&gt;
{if Socialtext.perms.edit}
&lt;span class=&quot;st-tags-tagdelete&quot;&gt;
&lt;a href=&quot;#&quot; onclick=&quot;Tags.deleteTag(’${t.name|escapespecial|quoter}’); return false&quot;
title=&quot;Remove ${t.name|h|quoter} tag from page&quot; class=&quot;st-tags-tagdelete&quot;&gt;[x]&lt;/a&gt;
&lt;span&gt;&lt;/&gt;
{/if}
&lt;/li&gt;
{/for}
</textarea>

Surprised this got past the CondeNet team who runs Wired.com, they’re a good bunch.  Some of the only pages whose descriptions haven’t been totally tossed by the above block of code are the Socialtext instructional pages, release notes and documentation online, which were left online in their original form for the site’s “Help” section.

Remember kids, audit your CMS! I wonder how many of Conde Nast’s other sites are using this CMS…