Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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 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="">
Something tells me you don't need too powerful of search tools when you're looking for a site called "GodFuckingDammit.com".
Most folk looking for that probably also try "go to hell" in google (try it, it's fun, but don't forget to include the quotes).
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
<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
But then I don't know where exactly the would be expecting to land...
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 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.
That's what the ALT attrbute is for: text that is parsed by robots and search engines in place of the image.