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Declaring The Death of Metatags
theduck writes "Andrew Goodman of Traffick.com pleaded for someone to announce the end of metatags (at least with respect to trying to skeeve good search engine ranking). and Danny Sullivan, Editor of The SearchEngineReport obliged. Personally, I've resisted using them for years, but convincing clients that they're not worth the effort has always been difficult. Does anyone (except porn sites) actually use them anymore?"
they have helped index my sites just the way i like them in relevant search engines.
I mean , even browsing the source of Slashdot's front page right now, I see a reference to MetaTags...
:P
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See???
Er, um, I use them for redirects/page refreshes
I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
I mean, you don't exactly get better rankings (as the article pointed out).
...
sex dick pussy vagina cum cumbath ass fuck britney spears orgasm
only cause when I made my site, they were actually seen by excite, webcrawler, etc... now the site is older, though my content is still updated regularly,.. I guess I have just been too lazy to remove them. lol.
We use them since we offer to build web sites. They have never been of much use for our client's sites (not enough boobs, I suppose), but the clients demand them and the only thing I *won't* give them when they ask for it are animated @-signs.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
Well, I know the post was except for porn sites, but the reason that porn sites use 'em is because they work! Nobody knows search engines more than porn site owners. Part of what got me this listing was good meta tags. Porn sites rule the web as far as traffic and profitability. When in doubt, do what to porn sites do.
But where will I find britney, agularia, blond, redhead, nude, celebs now?
Meta tags are used a lot... there's widespread knowledge of so-called "google bombing".. Google pops up some of its search results based on the content between an A HREF tag, as you can read about here: Google Bomb...
Much like security, I think this is the kind of thing that hackers and tinkerers will always find a way to exploit. The question is who can stay ahead in the race?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Yes, I use them on pages I want crawled. However I do not put much effort into them. I just give a few keywords. I don't try putting every word under the sun in them like the porn sites do.
<meta name="will_be_shutdown_by_the_riaa" value="">
<meta name="contains_drm_technology" value="">
<meta name="capable_of_withstanding_slashdot_effect" value="">
<meta name="viewable_with_browser_other_than_IE" value="">
<meta name="uses_extremely_irritating_blink_tag" value="">
<meta name="requires_irritating_to_install_plugin" value="">
Just because some people exploit them doesn't mean they aren't relevent. They are still an important ingredient of HTML soup.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Though I've never used them on a single one of my sites in the past few years, my boss still insists that I place them on every page that I create so that search engine rankings will go up.
Meta tags will still be around for mahy of us building the site searching solutions that include the meta tags.
Overall, it was more an honors system than effective solution for large search engines. The system was easy to trick and abuse, and hence new algorithms. When writing a search mechanism for a small site, it's sometimes easier to base it on metatags assuming all pages have them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In most cases, refresh seems to be used by sites to get more advertising hits. I find it obnoxious when I leave a page open and it reloads just so that it can show me a new ad. Sure, for news sites the headlines might change, but if I want to see the latest headlines, I have a reload button.
Are there any legitimate uses of refresh?
META Tags are still useful for their intended purpose. You must remember, Werners-Lee imagined a collaborative web of peers, not the segmented web of combatants we have attained. Therefore, META tags are still in use in the type of applications envisioned at CERN: Intranet search engines among academic peers. The death of META tags on the Internet is the natural consequence of the inability of some members of the Internet to behave maturely.
Dr. Joseph Hairston
Superintendent, CCBC
yes i use them. on my site i even made a routine that extracts keywords from the content of my pages (news, articles, software download, etc. out of database) and puts it in the keywords meta tag. i'm optimistic they're useful in at least some matters.
.. hmmmm
well, the only reason not to use is them is to avoid traffic by reducing the pagesize. makes a view hundred bytes saved per pageview
The second article linked states: `Without good countermeasures (like discriminating, smart, customizable research tools and search indexes), the Internet would be like "two billion channels and nothing on."` Which web have they been browsing, anyway?
we weren't trying to spoof search engines, but rather feeding them into our own search engine (a licensed copy of altavista), and using them to have a correct synopsis and ranking.
of course, other search engines ignored them, and quite often we used custom tags, but when working with 3rd party software, they were (and are, since the dotcom still somewhat exists) a godsend.
I believe that some search engines look to see if keywords in your META tags are repeated in the content, and increase your page's ranking if they are. I'm sure it's not as advanced as engine's like Google's methods, but not everyone uses Google for their searches and META tags only add a few bytes to the code....
where the comment ends and sig begins
I sure wish robots.txt allowed wildcards or regular expressions.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
Within a corporation, having meta-tags can greatly enhance the ability to search internal documents.
There's no point to keywords anymore, since with sellout searching, you mostly get results based on the highest bidder, not the most relevant information.
As far as anything else goes, metatags for search engines have been so abused for years as to be deserve extermination.
My boss was hounding me about getting our site listed higher with the search engines. I submitted a link to our site in various free web based business directories, and added it to the open directory project [dmoz.org]. After a couples weeks we were being returned 3 or 4 from the top. The site contains no meta tags
I still use them on a handful of client intranet sites where I only want to search for the values of the metatags, not the content page.
For example if have an intranet site with thousands of ducments about various hardware compements. All of the hardware has a part number and all documents pertaining to that hardware have the part number in the metatags.
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" Content="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
But I guess that slashcode is not the w3c 's best friend
The Canadian Federal Government is in the process of sinking millions of dollars of taxpayers' money in what they're calling the "Common Look and Feel Project". One of the biggest money-pits in the project has been the metatagging. Amusingly,the standard they're pushing has changed mid-stream often enough that very few federal employees know what their target is. (Kind of a microcosm of what's happened on the Internet as a whole...)
Sometimes I get an urge to see every word in the English language and find oddballs. Luckily some sites include every single word in the language in their meta-tags. I simply go to view source and begin my adventure. :o
..just in case sometime I want to put them into an own "private" index. I guess I would not have Googles cool algorithms therefor I have to (and can, since I am the author of the pages) rely on meta info.
they're only talking about the KEYWORD one.
the description tag is still used to display a blurb about your site in many search engines.
and then there's the always-fun meta refresh tag.
The poster seems to be fogetting that meta tags have aa greater span of use than simply for search engines. For example refreshes and redirects. Also, theres nohing wrong with using them. As a developer, i normally add them in my sites. My reasoning is that since it can only help and make ure listting more specific, why not?
what happened to spell check? please decode the above comment to your best ability.
Special Offer: Are you targeting the right keywords?
How do you know if people are searching on your keywords? Use WordTracker, and you'll get inside information on what people are really searching for. With this top secret information, you can optimize your site the right way the first time and see immediate results!
This was the ad at the bottom of the page.. Ironic, no? Maybe even a little hypocritical? Sigh..
... a reference to the awesome Meta Crap article which highlights very clearly the problems with relying on <META> tags for useful information.
The only thing I ever used meta tags for (at least since the advent of Google as the search engine of choice for the majority of Web users) was for redirects. But that only works if browsers support the redirect and if the user doesn't press stop or back, etc. Thus for redirecting users I use PHP's HTTP header redirect and equivalent in ASP.
/>
That said there is one meta tag that we all need:
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true"
Back when Marshall Applewhite and all the other loopy web developers in Rancho Santa Fe, California, put on their Nikes and sweats and dined on chocolate pudding, I was able to get the Heavens Gate webpage, View Source (in Netscape) revealed a lot of meta keywords, I see they still use them.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Ok, so the linking structure can help - if the page is linked to other pages which also feature my search terms then it is probably a collection of relevant, in-depth information.
But popularity?!?
I don't care if I'm the only person in the world who knows that this page exists - if it has the content I'm looking for then I want to see it.
When we were looking at new search engines for the campus internet here at the University there were times I wished that we were able to use meta tags to weigh results. Unfortunately the implementation would have been a nightmare we decided. They make sense on a small site possibly, less than 100,000 pages, where there are only a few departments designing and building websites, but to come up with and implement the proper meta tags for each department to use (and knowing that people still probably would not use them correctly) would have been a nightmare. (We have somewhere around 1.5 million pages at last estimate)
Basically what I'm saying is Meta-tags are only useful if they have actual relevance, and really are only useful for companies that are trying to design their own intranet and sitelevel extranet search engines.
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
Metatags are still useful, just less so on the public internet. Like all information retrieved from the public internet, metatag keyword and description information must be considered suspect. It's useless for search engines that index arbitrary pages. So what good is metatag information? At the very least, local site searching. If you add a simple search engine to your web site, the keyword and description information is very likely to be valid (after all, it's your site). It's also useful for external sites that might index you specifically. For example, when Google decides to index the University of Wisconsin at Madison web sites, the metadata information isn't perfect, but relatively trustworthy.
I also wish that Google would show the page's metatag description in addition to the text in the displayed page. Sure, you need to also show the displayed page matches to help quickly identify liars, but Google could easily show the description as well. For many sites the description is an excellent summary useful for filtering out bad hits.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
I still use them, although I only use it for my own personal web pages. If helping someone else to build their own site, I would recommend to use the META tags for keywords.
Relive the BBS Past - One Byte at a Time! www.ssabbs.com
did I miss the slashdot story about Redhat 8.0? I guess so!
keanmarine.com
Yes. Next question?
It seems a little cynical that at the end of the first article at Traffick.com there's an advertisement for 'Wordtracker', which supposedly will make you RICH if you just fork over a few bucks and let them show YOU how using the right keywords will make you RICH. Did I mention they'll make you RICH?
But then I don't know where exactly the would be expecting to land...
Well, one of my stories, anyway. I used a grand total of 6 metatags in my index header. When I submitted it to AltaVista, I found that three of them turned my page up number one on the results list. The other three put me in the top 10 results easy. That's the one and only time I've ever used a metatag. The result? Well, I can't really say that all of the nearly 100,000 hits I've gotten this past year has come from that search engine (I also had a listing on the Anime Web Turnpikefor a time), but since my other listings have been removed, I can safely say that it hasn't hurt my counter stats at all.
Pr0n mongers aren't the only ones who have used them successfully. Of course, they're targeting a 'niche' audience (a big one), and I'm targeting a smaller one. But hey, beggers can't be choosers, right? I never expected to see my counter get anywhere close to 100,000 in the short time it has, and I can partially thank metatags for that result.
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
The article deals with knocking metas out of search engine criteria, not as removing them from web-browsers. Your refresh and redirect metas should still happily work (or not) as usual.
I like to put key words like "barney and friends", "sesame street", "pokemon", "robots", and "digimon" in my meta tags so little kids will see my porn pics. :)
<meta name="moderation totals" content="+5, +5, +5, +5, +5, +5">
pay no mind to this post inexplicably up here at the top of the page
I realize that this was mostly talking about search engines, but that isn't the only use for meta-tags.
At the last company I worked for, we implemented a search within our website function, and meta tags helped out a lot.
The only problem we had was when somebody tagged a document wrong. But, on a closed system like our website, we could fix the documents with incorrect tags, and we didn't have to worry about malicious abuse of tags.
But I do agree that tagged data on Internet searches is junk. Google's system is definitely the way to do Internet ranking.
Google!
Without keywords tag, you are left with e.g. this solution (scroll down to the bottom of the page). Not pretty, but search-engine compliant, huh?
Perhaps a better way would be to index these tags with low priority, as some search engines still do. This way, the keywords would only matter if there aren't many other pages with them (misspellings and rare terms), or in conjunction with visible text (variants and attributes). Well, a search engine can check misspelling of common words, but not rare terms and proper names. Both ways, the tags would be hard to abuse while useful in certain searches.
The laziness is working against this (why bother with something which is not visible on the page?), but without meta tags the Web is becoming dummier, in a way. Hope the search engines will master technology to replace them, but it's not quite there yet!
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
I have found that quite a few search
engines take the description meta tag
and list it next to the search results.
dogpile for one does this
Metatags for keywords and description are still being read by google and most other engines. Meta description is used to describe sites, and meta keywords are [mostly] used to weed out keyword stuffers.
All html code is read by engines, and all code is weighted. What changes between updates and algo's is the internal weighting of tags and code. So while meta description isn't worth what is once was, it's still being counted.
Filling out and making a complete html page, *including* *appropriate* metadata, is still the most important task of the webmaster, especially one that wants to rank high in with the bots.
Next they'll be saying that "img alt"-tags are dead too. Og wait, they did. To weeks later we got http://images.google.com/ [which does nothing but read alt tags and file names]
penhead
IMO what metatags are good for is supplying synonyms that you don't want to have to put into your text.
For example, a webpage might be about "OOP Criticism". However, searchers may not think to use the word "criticism", and instead look for "OOP complaints", "OOP skeptics", etc.
"OOP criticism" and "OOP skepticism" are pretty closely related. But text indexing or link indexing probably would not be able to make the connection.
Thus, they have legit uses IMO. Sure, they are abused, just like any other technology, including word indexing an link tracing.
A search engine should use *multiple* approaches IMO. Better yet, allow one to select the weights of each one for a given search. Have drop-down boxes with numbers from 0 to 9 on which to select the weightings given to links, text, and metatags.
Table-ized A.I.
I use keywords pulled from a database. All germane to the content of the page.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
So what's all this Google stuff everybody's talking about?
I guess if the only value you see to these tags is as a way to manipulate the search engine results, then yeah, maybe a case could be made to do away with them. But meta tags can be used for a whole lot more -- other people mentioned using them to refresh or redirect pages, but there are other goodies too. For example, I encourage my developers to drop this onto each page: "name='developer' content='Employee Name'" -- it's an ego stroke for developers to be able to show that off to their friends. Also, the copyright can be put into a meta tag. Why? Because it isn't visual, so all the clueless newbies who copy the site with a GUI tool will fail to remove that tag. We catch a few people that way, although only the most stupid.
For a while, at Borland, I had a pretty low-end (but working) content-management system, where I put an expiration date into a meta tag along with an author name, and then had a Perl script that flagged any out of date file and emailed the author. This was brute-force Perl recursing through the htdocs folder and reading in each file, so it wasn't database-backed, but in 1995 my boss thought it was hot. Nowadays there are better ways to do most everything, and meta tags are not required for much, but they are still a very useful option, and allow for some creativity -- regardless of search engines.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
I publish a photo gallery and have relied upon keywords to describe what's pictured but not necessarily mentioned in a photo's caption. This appears to work with Google from what I can tell. The same keywords are used by my site's internal search engine, so I have to think of and store them anyway. I would be happy to change if there's a better way.
www.cgstock.com
Better than metatags, IMO, is Googlebombing -- i.e. making a bunch of sites point to yours.
I actually managed to pull off a wholey unplanned yet quite effective googlebomb in the last few months. A side project of mine, Quizilla, has ome feature where it give you HTML coede to past into your weblog. Well, since Quizilla is a free service , I put an advetising string in that HTML, "brought to you by Quizilla", with a link to the site.
Well, through some circumstances that got really popular really quick and people were pasting a lot og this HTML into their pages.. and what happened when Google indexed all those pages?
Instant Googlebomb.
I'm kinda sad I wasn't selling anything, or else I'd be rich.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
having the proper link
http://www.search-engine-optimization-services-c ompany.com
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
<meta id="2" value="???">
<meta id="3" value="Profit!!!">
interestingly, the article html contains meta name="keywords" content="metatags are evil, metatags must die, death to the meta tags"
meta tags have little to do with ranking, and have had little to do for a long time.
m pany.com listed on a highly traveled page with many of the keywords that are relevant to your search engine company http://www.search-engine-optimization-services-com pany.com.
m pany.com I would pay attention to this fact, and take advantage of linking my own site http://www.search-engine-optimization-services-com pany.com when i could.
MUCH more important is to have links to your, say SEO company http://www.search-engine-optimization-services-co
if i was going to try for the ever important link relevancy and popularity rating for my search engine optmization and page ranking company http://www.search-engine-optimization-services-co
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Sounds like an old-fashioned "indent must die" thread: You can't trust information from sites you don't manage.
But... you can value the information from sites you have a relationship with (or which have a higher trust-factor than the average porn-site).
For example, if you have a spider running on your own intranet (that's a relationship), you know that the people running the webservers are not going for the most hits but for the best information, you know you can trust these meta-tags.
bash$
I think the main issue with "keyword" metatags is that they're completely unreliable for search engine use, since it's easy to abuse them by stuffing them with terms that users search for that aren't necessarily related to the content of your page. Fine, I think that's obvious. Nobody's really going to argue that one.
:P
The "description" metatag is still EXTREMELY useful, though. Even if a search engine doesn't use the metatags for ranking purposes, it can still use the "description" metatag to display a nice human-readable summary of the page. Often search engines just display the first N characters of text on the page and use that for a summary, which usually is not a good or readable summary for the site.
The problem with Google is that it seems to randomly use the "Description" metatag sometimes, but not others. Here's an example. Notice how the second "Anime Expo 2002 at Bootyproject" link has a nice readable summary under it, but the first one doesn't. (It may have changed between the time I posted it and the time you view it, who knows) Which makes no sense to me, because if you look at the source for each of the two pages, the metatag information is identical for both pages. I don't get it, I dunno if Google's just a little broken in that respect, or if I screwed something up. Sorry to pimp my own site there... it's just an example I'm obviously quite familiar with.
But anyway, when search engines and authors use the description metatag properly (ie, the search engine doesn't use it for ranking, and the author takes the time to write a nice summary), it's pretty nice.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
netscape navigator, mozilla et al. still screw up unicode if the appropiate meta tag isnt set.
just my 2 eurocents...
I know who still uses meta-tags!
www.se.....oh wait, you said besides pr0n sites....
well, never mind, then.
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
Come on. Meta-tags makes us rank 1st in every page we install them. Every decent search engine uses them. There's some uncool things about them like the ability of repeating keywords to make the ranking higher. But that belongs to search engines not to over-index them.
I might as well plug me new site here! www.meredithdillman.com ----- fantasy/anime art, illustration and prints (you know you want one). Could someone have told me it was pointless before my last minute 3 am adding of meta tags?
catgirls and fairies
Unless you have self-describing data (which is something that XML promises to do), you have to deal with metadata as well. So, until everybody publishes their data in XML (and use XSLT to draw them on a browser), I believe that metatags have a value.
How exactly would XML solve this? Field/column names tend to only help on "structured" content. Not general text.
Sure, XML walks the dog, cleans the windows, removes earwax, and improves your sex life, but improving on meta-tags is just going a tad far.
Table-ized A.I.
however, thay should be limited to 25 characters. This way they would need to be relevent and precise to get proper ranking.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"Does anyone (except porn sites) actually use them anymore?"
Yep. It's a company called Microsoft, and an HTML *cough* editor *cough* known as FrontPage. They stuff plenty of pointless meta tags in there for you.
I use meta tags on my intranet for searching; makes things a lot easier. The idea that remote crawlers would use them strikes me as silly, though.
All's true that is mistrusted
"Declaring the death of" any technology is ridiculously shortsighted. Just because meta tags aren't doing what you hoped they would, doesn't mean they don't have a useful purpose as a lot of the posts on this thread point out. This is slightly analogous to declaring the death of the horse because they're no longer the first choice for transportation.
I agree with much of the article - search engines rankings are best when they are largely based on factors out of the webmaster's control.
---
Travel Photography
I don't see what else to use.
Olde York.Com
Someone tell me suggestions to use.
What about serverside content, or content that is pushed? How do these get indexed? I mean if content is retreived from a database, will google access that database? I don't think so.
Furthermore, with the advent of more and more Flash (tm) sites, how will these get indexed if the META-tags are abandoned? Currently, Google only uses the META-tags if there is no relevant text in the body, but what if they stop that altogether?
Just my 2 cents
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
The article mentions nothing about the death of other metatags used for search engine promotion, only the keywords tag
I still swear by the description tag which is still used by many search engines. And to be honest, until I see the search engine rankings of my own and my clients sites suffering from the use of the keywords tag I will still continue to use it.
Even if only one major search engine uses the tag, then I think the effort of including it is validated.
*BSD is dead.
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
I use the
NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"
NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE"
to *prevent* the pages from showing up in search engines. Why would I want to do this? To keep from going over my monthly bandwidth quota.
Is there a better way than using meta tags for indexing your site? What if your pages are mostly composed of graphics? Adius
It does no just have to be search. You can use properly organized metadata to do thigs like associating related content together. This can be done more reliably with author specified metadata.
This summer I wrote a perl module called FileMetadata (available from CPAN) that collects metadata from files. I have used it to ease content management headaches on my website. Each HTML (XHTML) file has metadata that is used to advertise it on my site's index pages. I have ideas for more nifty things that can be done with metadata but as always time is finite.
Why would you not use meta tags? Who cares if some people abuse them and some search engines don't use them - some do. If you are trying to convince your "client" to not use meta tags, that just seems ridiculous. Building a good list of keywords and throwing them in your meta keywords is not a bad thing.
I don't see what the issue is. Just because some people abuse a free market society doesn't mean that free market societies are bad. That was an analogy.
People, especially techie-weenies, have a tendency to off-the-deep-end of over stupid shit. But I guess it got me to kill 15 minutes out of my boring life reading and writing about it.
Whatever, use meta tags or don't use meta tags - who gives a shit? Hell don't even register at search engines, or even make a web site there are already millions of shitty web sites anyway.
LoRider
We had a client recently tell us that a previous web hosting company told him that his site was being submitted to "millions of search engines every day." My boss and I nearly gave ourselves both aneuryisms trying not to laugh when he uttered that one. Mostly because he clearly accepted it at face value.
You can imagine how hard it was to convine him that meta-tags were not all that relevant anymore. This was mere months ago, mind you.
My
Limekiller
Is that why both the great Firewall of China and my school restrict "oddball" sites like google?
Where would I be without a custom-made proxy server installed on a different port of the only computer with a real connection. I should've written a socks proxy instead of an http proxy.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
That's what the ALT attrbute is for: text that is parsed by robots and search engines in place of the image.
And, less funny, the second story:
While metadata might not be so useful for general search engines the Australian government has mandated metadata for their websites to help generate dentral directories for govt agency activities.
Metadata can also be used for content aggregation purposes. Our parent organisation is planning on using Vignette (yuck) for it's central website and they want to suck up information from our own site (Apache yay!).
What is the inverse of the Matrix?
Socrates was banished for his views. I expect no less from our 'modern' society.
Lovely source of ambiguity, the English language. This could mean you expect to be banished for your views, or that you expect modern society to banish (or that they did banish) Socrates for his views (it merely you expect no less... no less than what? Socrates being banished for his views....)
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Author, generator, description (very important when your content doesn't look too hot in a search engine summary; hello ALA and your dumbass "this site will look much better in.." blurb), content type and the way too often overlooked text encoding, and things like DCMI.
They're also useful for keeping your documents in a form you can process later; you can, for instance, embed creation dates, CVS revisions, shorter/alternate titles and summaries for links.
<slaps timothy for spreading FUD against a perfectly useful HTML tag>
EAT FLAMING DEATH TIMMY!
One word: Ottawa.
Okay, that isn't terribly descriptive and it is damning a lot of reasonable expenditures. But it isn't so far off the mark as to be libelous.
Though I too would love to see the link in question!
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Actualy, I generaly use HTTP redirects to move pages, but meta refresh can be usefull for people who don't have access to the software.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
What's the alternative? If you want to get a site listed, indexed and searched successfully what else are you supposed to do? Pay Yahoo/MSN to list you? They will provide you with META tags you have to put in the site anyway to get listed, searched and found. I have successfully listed dozens of businesses web sites from aquaculture to aeronautical research systems. They all get very high hit rates for no-money-down and no exploitive or mis-directed meta tags, just some properly directed efforts in getting free valid listings and all because of the initial set of Meta tags.
I'll bet that Google DOES use meta tags. In preferences there's an option to filter explicit text and/or explicit images.
By all accounts, the best way to automatically detect a porn site would be to use meta tags!
Which makes you wonder why browsers don't provide features for parents to filter web sites based on meta tags? Instead they rely on ICRA etc that never really work 'cos not enough sites use them.
Meta tags CAN be useful - long live meta tags!
I don't even think google looks at meta tags when figuring it's page ranking. The reason is that most moron porn spammers just fill theirs up with the same crap (Including non-pornographic terms like "SUV" and stuff... wtf?) Searching for a random selection of your meta keywords dosn't bring up your site.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Wait, where's the porn?
I put my name, coworkers names, company, and all the technologies I used into each and every page I develop here at work.
It gets neet search results when I search for my name, but will NEVER grant me results when I search for XHTML.
Its still fun.
The truth is bigger than your beliefs, your opinion of truth has no impact on reality. - rtaft (5.15.2002)
I agree entirely. The search spammers abused the system and now it's gone -- a tragedy of the commons.
However, metadata on web sites is a powerful and useful tool, so smaller search engines can take advantage of it even though the web-wide ones can't trust anything that's not visible.
There's a new approach to fielded searching called "faceted metadata" search that's really designed for rich metadata systems and well-populated databases, such as online catalogs, recipes, auctions and technical documentation. It shows the applicable metadata fields in context, a dynamic taxonomy. So if you search for "pepper" in a recipe database, you can then navigate based on other ingredients, cusine, holidays and so on.
I think this is great for all those databases where there's tons of information but no easy way to navigate it. I written up a Faceted Metadata backgrounder with some examples. It makes sense, it's usable, I think it's the Next Big Thing in search.
Avi
For those with limited vision (or blindness), screen readers can (and usually do) use metatags to aid in navigation and content descriptions.
For anyone who's interested, check out the W3C site on Web Accessibility Guidelines at:
W3C Web Accessbility Guidelines
We use meta tags as well to aid htdig indexing for local searches. A user might search on an abbreviated keyword that doesn't show up in the page itself, so we just drop in a meta tag.
Meta tags are commonly used for promoting sports betting sites. Example: Xsportsbook hires several guys to make 100 dummy sites talking about different sports betting, they al refer to Xsportsbook as the best one and place many links to it, but aparently it is not officialy linked to it, they just recommend it. So this sportbook ranks great on meta search engines. Try searching for bet sports on google, go to the first unsponsored link, which is the best rated sportsbook?
Check out Website development, maintenance and accesibility cons
What about webcams?
Sig: I stole this sig.
<head>
<title>An End to Metatags (Enough Already, Part 1) - Traffick.com</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="metatags are evil, metatags must die, death to the meta tags">
<meta name="description" content="If you can read this meta description tag, then the author's wish for the end of metatags has not yet come true. Someday, it will.">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles2.css" type="text/css">
</head>
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I was glad about a year ago when Slashdot added the LINK tag to help with navigation.
For web authors out there - imagine an easy place to define where your home page is, and some basic navigation links, including a copyright page and an author link.
For browsers that support it, iCab on the Mac being one, it is a nice addition to a site when I find them.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Starting this morning I began reading the docs and installing the ht://Dig search engine. There are a lot of configurable settings.
When I first got it working, I immediately realized that the 350-some static html files on my site really only have a couple dozen different sets of meta tags (due to starting new pages by copying existing ones). In fact, many of my pages don't even have really unique title that differentiate them from other similar pages on the site. If you're interested in seeing it, it's not yet linked from the rest of the site, but will be soon, at this new search page. The results still suck, mostly due to my poor meta and title tags.
That's not ht://Dig's fault, of course, and they do have you options to configure the weight for various things... and luckily I've used <h2>l and <h3> tags for labeling sections on almost all the pages, so I turned up the weighting for the text in those and in the link text on the site.
Still I have a lot of work to do to make my little site nicely searchable... and most of it is in the titles and meta tags. The keyword meta tags are the one place where you can list words that you can be certain a local search engine like ht://Dig will make use of them and display those pages.
Too bad the meta keyword tag was declared dead today.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I don't have keyword and description metatags on my site at the moment (just PICS and generator) and I suspect my ranking on several non-Google search engines is suffering because of it. You can no longer hit my main art site by searching for my name at Google since I removed them.
Different search engines operate in different ways, whether it's through link text (search Google for "pit of voles" and you'll get fanfiction.net, thanks to the efforts of a good friend), the title tag, the body text or keywords/description. A good combination of all four will get you an honest ranking... maybe they should be calling for general metatag honesty rather than the death of metatags? (Like that'd happen...)
The porn sites don't just use metatags, by the way... until recently they were into placing lots of tiny/background-coloured text on the page to skew hits in their direction.
Sure I use meta tags, on practically every page: :)
What if the results were weighted against the number of elements in the meta tag. Putting the english dictionary into your meta tags will just put you on the bottom, right? The rewards for being verbose only exist in your English teacher's class.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
It's rather silly to proclaim the death of meta tags just because they can be manipulated. The content of web pages are also being manipulated to obtain a better rating in search enginges. Should we stop using content as well? Blank web pages everywhere, because that is the only way to be sure that they actually contain what search engines promise us?
It would probably be far more useful to begin black listing sites who try to divert traffic their ways by means of "lies". Something along the line the anti-spam lists that are in use for email.
At work we need to use Meta Tags all the time for our Internal Intranet. These things are useful for stuff like that. They are very useful in an enviroment where they accurately reflect the content of the page. Ted Tschopp
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
The Meta Description tag is copied from the "list this site" function in Open Directory when an editor adds a listing to a site (if there is one).
As such, it is the best chance you get to influence or possibly dictate the description listed in the Directory, as well as any directories it feeds. (Google Directories, AOL, and some other big ones.)
A well written meta description tag is likely to be left nearly intact by the editor. That allows you to include search terms in the description people might use to find your site. (The editor may not think of the same terms on their own.)
Any link you submit to Open Directory should have a description tag in it, including the home page or sub-subject oriented pages of your site.
Beyond the home page, I do not bother with meta-tags anymore, and tell web customers to not bother either. As far as I can tell, most search spiders rely on what a human would see to list content nowdays, so the best way to get good listings is to have a content-rich, well made site.
I still use meta-refresh tags occasionally for reorganizing sites or bouncing traffic off what would be a dead link. (Stupid marketing department does not proofread or think to check their URLs.)
Otherwise, meta tags are a waste of time. (Contact, copyright, author, and other information should be visible without viewing source code, in my opinion.)
http-equiv/content/charset..
;))
As well as generator="emacs", and a description of the page.
But I must say, no one ever reads meta tags. Else how can I have gone on for years without being barraged with flames by vi users?
(Okay, I admit, I use vi for 'real' coding.
I don't know about anyone else, but good search engines should be smart enough to grep keywords right out of the content itself. If a stupid search engine is just gonna spider a document just for the META tags anyway, might as well get better keywords by reading the whole document, IMHO.
---
This space is for office use only.
Coderz 4 Life
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-bork/
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-elmer/
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-piglatin/
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/
Some cats swing, and others don't. Don't you be the kind that won't.
Don't you people see the commercials? Those repairmen don't have anything to do at all, how can you declare the death of something that never breaks?!
Some child blocking software still uses them to tell if a site is "bad". Nobody should be blocked from my sites because they are not ranked.
...in the "Pascal's Wager" sense of the word. When I make a webpage, I figure that, since it's so easy just to stick a few words in there, I might as well. It's not like it's costing me anything but a few moments of time, and if it is useful for something, so much the better.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Does anyone (except porn sites) actually use them anymore?
Yes, the guy who argues that they are useless.
<head>
<title>An End to Metatags (Enough Already, Part 1) - Traffick.com</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="metatags are evil, metatags must die, death to the meta tags">
<meta name="description" content="If you can read this meta description tag, then the author's wish for the end of metatags has not yet come true. Someday, it will.">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles2.css" type="text/css">
</head>
A good site must not contain any pop-ups or be full of crap.... must only have good free porn.
Meh.
First of all, just because "keywords" tags can be fraudulently specified, doesn't mean that they are useless. I can publish pr0n in a book titled "Undergraduate Physics"; does that make book titles useless? The fault is not in the "keywords" tag; the fault is in naively trusting unverified data. It's okay to put lollipops from the store in your mouth, but it's not okay to do the same with lollipops that you pick out of the gutter.
OK, my turn now. I wish somebody would call a moratorium on printing an entire webpage in a teensy weensy font. I have carefully specified my default font size, because that is the size which is most appropriate for reading long pages of text on my monitor with my eyes. It's okay to make stuff smaller if it's supposed to be "the fine print", but for whole articles, please use the default font size.
"It sure was strange to see something on Usenet about me that didn't involve Klingon gang rape." -- Wil Wheaton
Okay, if the person who submitted this story actually read Slashdot, they would have saw the story about 90% of the Internet being obsolete. So then, if that story is correct, obviously meta tags abound! If that story is incorrect, then you have to question the journalistic integrity of Slashdot. Who would want to do that?.. tsk tsk.
listen to some songs that I made with my guitar and COOL EDIT PRO
How much did you pay for the rights to the underlying musical work? You can't have written them yourself, because you're bound to step on somebody else's copyright on the four-note melodic hook that you used.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I haven't used them in a least a couple years now on any site I work on, but then again most of those sites are Military/DoD related. They may be on the internet but it's not crucial data for anyone to see. It could just be me though.
mcox.com - Useful Information re: IT, Running, Fitness, Finance, or Ann Arbor!
In contrast to nearly about everyone else on /., I'm going to stick my neck out and say that I appreciate good meta tags.
If I'm on a slow link, I get to see a brief description of the page and then decide if I want to go to it. And if I'm on a slow link I disable flash, scripting, etc. and set cache to a small amount.
It also helps that I use a different browser for slow links. =) (Nope, not IE, Mozilla or Opera.)
I put spamtrap addresses in META TAGs, links to wpoison pages, etc... Lots of fun.
But there are other search sites out there who do look at meta tags, and having a listing with them improves your google rating.
If your business depends primarily on search engines to draw clients to your site, you still benefit from appropriate keyword meta tags.
This meta tag can still be quite useful as a quick and easy way to redirect from one page to another without having to do any scripting.
It's quite common to search for a docunment from which you memorize an exact, particular phrase.
Expanding your query with synonyms isn't a big problem for search engine and somewhere I remember seeing such a feature.
The following is required in HTML 4.01:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
Then there is useful stuff:
<meta name="author" content="Elizabeth Lemke">
<meta name="author-email" content="nowhere@nowhere.net">
It is also useful for redirects and header information to the browser.
FWIW, I also use <link> tags in the <head> of HTML files for referring to important parts of the site and my e-mail.
I know I use them (BurntMail)...
Last I checked, a lot of the big-guys still use them as well (Cisco, RedHat, Microsoft, Mandrake, and SourceForge for example)
PR
...the death of *BSD? Or Mark Twain? Or Elvis, for that matter?
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
Here are two examples:
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
How about RDF?
[alk]
Any one know if any search engines are looking at longdesc="" as well as alt=""?
Some official Danish web sites use metatags, especially the Dublin Core tags help register the pages with the Danish "public service" search engines.
E.g. take a look at the Danish Ministry of Employment.
If the HTML-standard had imposed a limit on the number of meta-keywords a webmaster may enter for her page (say 10 max), webmasters would have been forced to think about which words they were including. It's the perceived lack of scarcity of resources that prevents a healthy "keyword-economy" from developing.
In my opininion it would still be possible to turn this thing around. If a couple of big search engines plastered an announcement all over their sites: "We only look at the first ten uniqe meta-keywords", things might change for the better.
Being well balanced is overrated. -- John Carmack
Are there any legitimate uses of refresh?
Our company's Web-based calendar is buried three or four layers deep in the intranet, and I'd never use it if I couldn't put it on the Active Desktop where I can see it as soon as I log in. I use a blank page with a meta redirect on my Active Desktop because Win98 is too stupid to recognise "*.php" as a web page. Sure, an iframe would probably work just as well. Gonna try that.
And meta refresh seems like a great way to keep it up to date!
Of course, whether anything involving the Active Desktop can be considered legitimate use is a matter of personal opinion :)
I have a spare laptop sitting off to the side of my desk that runs a news/stock/sportsticker across the top and I usually leave Google News running on it.
Helps me keep up with what's going on in the world; just a glance over from time to time and if any headlines catch my interest I can swivel over there and read the story. Otherwise the refresh takes care of showing me a relatively up-to-date news page without my having to remember to reach over and refresh it manually.
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
Problem is people don;t understand how to sue meta tags..
Its real simple have content
Now do a frequency word count.. hte highest frequency words go into meta tag keywords..
Gosh now was that Hard?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Um, have none of you folks heard of the Dublin Core?
Does anyone (except porn sites) actually use them anymore?
...."
:)
Isn't this a bit like saying "all trees (except those with leaves)
In other news, people discover a way to convince others to give up the use of meta tags, so that their websites with mega tags appear closer to the top in the search engines.
An interesting idea. I should try that.
I loved the Web back in the early '90s when people didn't have much of a clue about the Web and robots (this hasn't changed much, actually, but now there are "books" and "experts").
I couldn't count the amount of emails from irate "webmasters" (and phone calls from U.S. law-enforcement agencies) insisting that we hacked their sites because no links exist on their site to their hidden web pages...
Blank text indeed.
Er, I don't think they qualify as easter eggs if they're listed right out in the open on the Language Tools page.
You missed Klingon, btw.
Er, no, that's *not* what the "alt" attribute is for.
My understanding is that the text in an "alt" attribute is to be used by a web browser which cannot, or has been asked not to, show the image itself. Typically this should be a description of the image, or perhaps even an textual representation of the image (mmm, ASCII-art).
It can also be used to convey any information which is held in the image (e.g. an image of a pie chart could have the percentages in an "alt" attribute).
Nothing to do with robots or search engines, even if they 'misuse' them that way. Some web developers misuse an "alt" attribute to provide 'tooltips', having misunderstood it's purpose based on the behaviour of some web browsers.
Naturally, they may not want to admit that's what they do. But it seems like a good way to clean up the search results, and keep the customers happy.
This is intended to be a defensive publication of this technique. If you haven't submitted a patent application, it's too late now!
My friends, I am here to tell you of the wonderous continent known as
Africa. Well we left New York drunk and early on the morning of February 31.
We were 15 days on the water, and 3 on the boat when we finally arrived in
Africa. Upon our arrival we immediately set up a rigorous schedule: Up at
6:00, breakfast, and back in bed by 7:00. Pretty soon we were back in bed by
6:30. Now Africa is full of big game. The first day I shot two bucks. That
was the biggest game we had. Africa is primerally inhabited by Elks, Moose
and Knights of Pithiests.
The elks live up in the mountains and come down once a year for their
annual conventions. And you should see them gathered around the water hole,
which they leave immediately when they discover it's full of water. They
weren't looking for a water hole. They were looking for an alck hole.
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas, how he got in my
pajamas, I don't know. Then we tried to remove the tusks. That's a tough
word to say, tusks. As I said we tried to remove the tusks, but they were
imbedded so firmly we couldn't get them out. But in Alabama the Tuscaloosa,
but that is totally irrelephant to what I was saying.
We took some pictures of the native girls, but they weren't developed.
So we're going back in a few years...
-- Julius H. Marx [Groucho]
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