By: Tim Nash

It seems to be the time of year for heads of states to relaunch their websites, let's see how our fair Queen managed:

Her Majesties Privacy document

The British Monarchy web site, with the exception of the subscription system, does not store or capture personal information, but merely logs the user's IP address, which is automatically recognised by the web server.

We do not use cookies for collecting user information, and will not collect any information about you except that required for system administration of our web server.

http://www.royal.gov.uk/Contactus/Aboutthissite.aspx

While the above is technically true it is let down by


< script src='../TemplateAssets/GoogleAnalytics1.js' language='javascript' type='text/javascript'>< /script>


Queens SEO

Patrick from blogstorm who also was wandering through the Queens source code noticed the amusing use of meta tags.

< meta name="keyword" content="Queen" />

The single keyword per tag is down to the ASP content management system they are using, actually it seems to do several odd things but at least no SQL errors (unlike the assumed developers site)

Talking of which I did think the web development company (I assume that's the connection) leaving in their URL was a nice touch

< html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:Abseil="http://www.coraider.co.uk">


Staying on the SEO front, no h1 or 2 tags, and the h3 tags are nicely keyword rich with headings such as "Quick Links" and "Latest Videos" at least most images had an alt tag though no title tags on either images or links.

Royal duplicate content - yes I'm sure you are not surprised that the site itself is an indexed mess, most articles have at least 3 versions (ignoring the welsh and Gaelic language versions) with no order or priority in terms of indexing so some articles the text only version is showing, others the full content. The URL structure is also confused with some pages appearing as

www.royal.gov.uk/output/Page5140.asp

while others are:

www.royal.gov.uk/OutPut/Page6369.asp

Camel casing on a non unix server is not a disaster but if you have a url structure stick with one, but fear not because the new site has done away with these and now use categorised urls...

Only they are not indexed and the old ones, you guessed it 404s

Anything else? I really only spent a few minutes, to be fair the site is no where near as bad as most government websites but still a total fail. When making high profile launches your site will be picked at but sometimes it pays to actually check for the little things.

Update: Even the telegraph is having a dig six points for Search engine optimisation for the queen let's hope Queen Elizabeth trusted website team corrects some of their faults.

One final thing and its not SEO or privacy based, why when I look at the site do I think it looks like an old Nuke site?