every post was written by admin

I spent an evening checking what search engines think of this site. The answer was close to nothing, because the site was saying almost nothing about itself.

The byline was the easy one. Every post here was signed by a user called admin. I set up WordPress, the first account took the name, and I never looked at it again. My writing archive was filed under it. The display name is fixed, and the address of that archive still ends in admin, because that’s a different field and I haven’t touched it. Half a fix, and I know which half.

Then the larger one. No journal post on this site has ever carried structured data. The function that emits it checked for releases and projects and returned early for everything else, so it ran on the two types I update twice a year and skipped the one I write in. To a search engine, every post in the journal was an anonymous page. Nothing errored, because a missing tag isn’t an error, it’s an absence, and absences don’t show up in a log.

Archive pages had no canonical tag at all. The journal index, the tag pages, the project index: none of them stated which URL was the real one, which leaves a crawler to decide. My first attempt at fixing it pointed the journal index at the home page, which is a new wrong answer, so it needed a second pass.

Search results and the 404 page were asking to be indexed. I’d assumed WordPress handled that. I checked instead of assuming — a new hobby — and on this install it doesn’t.

The rest is housekeeping. A sitemap shouldn’t list my users. Tags named css and wordpress should read CSS and WordPress, because that’s what a person sees. The default category was still Uncategorized, which is what happens when you never choose. A tag called Git existed with nothing in it. It’s back now with a post attached, which is an improvement.

None of it shows. Nothing a visitor sees changed, which is the point and also the complaint: I could have run this site for another year and the machines reading it would have carried on believing all of it.