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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.
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
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.
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.
<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.
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
Within a corporation, having meta-tags can greatly enhance the ability to search internal documents.
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
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
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.
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"
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
Dude, you have issues.
Google hasn't sold out. They sell ad space, but it doesn't affect the ranking. That's not selling out. Altavista sold out, I'm still pissed at them.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
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...
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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.
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".
Link, please?
As a Canadian, I'd like to know where my money is being wasted.
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
That's what the ALT attrbute is for: text that is parsed by robots and search engines in place of the image.
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!
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.
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.
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
<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
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.
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?!
...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
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
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.
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.
(* It's quite common to search for a docunment from which you memorize an exact, particular phrase. *)
Yes, I agree. Sometimes people want to search that way. Perhaps have a check-box next to the 3 drop-down boxes mentioned that says, "exact words only" or "search synonyms" (checked by default).
But simple synonym lookup *alone* is still sometimes not sufficient. For example, one might look for "CPU performance help" or "slow computer diagnosis". both of these could be the same thing in practice, but simple synonym lookup would not find the other if one was given. For one, "performance" is *not* a synonym of "slow". Performance may have nothing to do with speed in *other* contexts.
It takes context understanding to do this kind of thing reasonably, and is something computers still suck at. AI lab projects are just touching the surface. But someday.....
Table-ized A.I.
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
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]
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
Um, have none of you folks heard of the Dublin Core?
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.