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Declaring The Death of Metatags

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the few-bad-apples-spoiled-the-barrel dept.

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?"

15 of 317 comments (clear)

  1. Re:redirects/refreshes? by Anonymous+Cowrad · · Score: 3, Informative

    Use url rewriting for redirects, it saves on HTTP transactions.

    --

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    pants ahoy
  2. Of course. by drhairston · · Score: 2, Informative

    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
    1. Re:Of course. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      you mean Berners-Lee.

      for others:
      http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

  3. what about the w3c ? by stud9920 · · Score: 4, Informative
    Does anyone (except porn sites) actually use them anymore ?
    What about the w3c ? To be fully compliant, with no warning whatsoever, with html 4.01 transitional, I had to add this line to my pages :

    <META http-equiv="Content-Type" Content="text/html; charset=us-ascii">

    But I guess that slashcode is not the w3c 's best friend
  4. Re:sure, i do. by damiam · · Score: 2, Informative

    Doesn't work anymore.

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    It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
  5. not all meta tags by self+assembled+struc · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:redirects/refreshes? by larien · · Score: 4, Informative
    Use url rewriting for redirects, it saves on HTTP transactions.
    Yup, they're great, except when you don't have control of the web site, i.e. you're using a web server provider. In that case, a META tag is your only choice. Well, there is Javascript, but the META tag is more generic.
  7. No discussion on Meta Tags is complete without... by Carnage4Life · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... a reference to the awesome Meta Crap article which highlights very clearly the problems with relying on <META> tags for useful information.

  8. Once for redirects... Still for Smart Tags by Dr.+Transparent · · Score: 4, Informative

    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" />

  9. Re:Refresh is evil by Tablizer · · Score: 3, Informative

    Are there any legitimate uses of [auto] refresh?

    Stock updates, auction standings, currency rate monitoring, remote alarms, ASCII football, slashdot karma ratings, etc.

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    Table-ized A.I.
  10. utf-8 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    netscape navigator, mozilla et al. still screw up unicode if the appropiate meta tag isnt set.

    just my 2 eurocents...

  11. Re:Metatags still useful by leviramsey · · Score: 3, Informative

    Uh Google already shows the meta description in their search results.

  12. Re:Images described by using the "keywords" meta t by migurski · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's what the ALT attrbute is for: text that is parsed by robots and search engines in place of the image.

  13. Re:sure, i do. / Google easter eggs... by jazzmanjac · · Score: 2, Informative
    Check out these google easter eggs:

    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.
  14. Meta is quite useful, thank you by lemkebeth · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.