Description Tags

Do you use automated link building software on your sites - such as Link Machine?

I've successfully used this for a while now for my own and customers' sites and am very pleased with it. But I've noticed that sometimes the directories get good PRs - in the best case every page PR4 - whilst sometimes the pages aren't ranked at all.

I've also noticed a change of page rank in my own webdesign site. For years now, all of the main pages have been PR4. But in the last update many internal pages dropped to PR3, with 2 dropping PR altogether. I expect that the 2 that dropped totally have at least in part cause the others to loose PR.

What have these in common? Well I was going through my own site making some changes when I noticed that the two pages in question accidentally shared meta descriptions. Neither page has been SEOd - price lists etc, so I've never noticed before.

Then I remembered that the links directory pages all take one template page for each site. So within each links directory, all of the meta descriptions must be the same. So I started to look.

And then I discovered that my links directories in which all pages have a PR have the description meta tag missing. The others either are on a low PR site or all of the pages have the same meta description.

You can imagine how quickly that meta tag was removed from my site CompareMortgageRates.co.uk. It will take a while to see anything - especially as the site has currently lost PR. But it's an interesting theory.