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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).
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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 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.
Within a corporation, having meta-tags can greatly enhance the ability to search internal documents.
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" Content="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
But I guess that slashcode is not the w3c 's best friend
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"
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
Are there any legitimate uses of [auto] refresh?
Stock updates, auction standings, currency rate monitoring, remote alarms, ASCII football, slashdot karma ratings, etc.
Table-ized A.I.
But then I don't know where exactly the would be expecting to land...
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.
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
interestingly, the article html contains meta name="keywords" content="metatags are evil, metatags must die, death to the meta tags"
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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
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