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?"

Comments

Synonyms

[Tablizer]

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.

The "Description" Metatag: still pretty useful....

[John_Booty]

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.

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. :P

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.