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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?"
Mentioning your site every chance you get on slashdot probably did more for your ranking than using a tag that google is known to ignore.
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.
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Which is one of the things they are there for.
META was never intended to be the primary key for search engines. The idea that search engines should believe a page with a billion Meta tags is pretty wierd.
The purpose of Meta was to allow people to add their own search terms to a document for their own convenience. That use is not invalidated just because Google and Co can't find a way to use that information any more than the existence of spam does not invalidate the idea of email.
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Read the article. It is only talking about keyword meta tags. There are lots of other types of meta tags. The Slashdot title is misleading.
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