Journalism.co.uk alerted Trinity news, publishers of the Liverpool Echo and Daily Post that hidden meta tags in many of their main news stories posted on their website contained Madeleine McCann related keywords.
The inclusion of the keywords “madeleine mccann, madeleine mcgann, kate mcgann, kate mccann” in the HTML for Liverpool news stories has now ceased and according to a spokesperson for Trinity News, this was an 'oversight' and has now been rectified.
Journalism.co.uk discovered a few months ago that many of these tags were being used in the meta data for the ‘Liverpool News Headlines’ on the Liverpool Daily Post site, despite the fact that many of the stories were un-related to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.
Known as 'keyword stuffing' and discouraged by Google the use of unrelated 'hidden' metadata ignores the importance of index works which have direct relevance to content although using commonly searched for phrases which can improve a site's SEO performance.
The Liverpool Echo and it's sister site the Post, boasts impressive peformance for Google searches relating to Madeleine McCann stories. Google says:
"While accurate meta descriptions can improve click-through, they won't impact your ranking within search results."]
A Trinity Mirror spokesman said: “The meta data was inserted some time ago when the Madeleine McCann story was at its height and was the most-searched item on our web sites. It was inserted to make it easier for our users to access a huge story of national and local interest. The fact that it wasn’t removed is an oversight, which has now been put right.”
