Meta Tags and Google

According to a new post from Google, Meta tags "help" Google to "accurately crawl, index, and your site in search results. Meta tags provide information to all sorts of clients, such as browsers and search engines."

From: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/answering-more-popular-picks-meta-tags.html

Although many of us still use Meta tags, it seems to be widely believed that the tags are no longer useful.

Your thoughts?

 

only keyword meta tags i guess

major SE just ignore them

 

The post doesn't mention keyword meta tags, that I saw. Interesting...

 

I think it is because Google doesn't use the keyword meta tag

 

now google is not considering meta tags .. lots of sparm.. since long time google dont care about meta tag. best way is to add all key words in the content itself

 

I think a lot of meta tags usefulness depends on whether the same keywords are found in the page content.

 

The Blogger post has good information. The thing I would emphasize to webmasters is that the Dgood Deescription meta tag is used for snippets in the search results and good descriptions help attract clicks/traffic. They do not, however, influence your rankings except in terms of indexing. Creating a unique Description meta tag makes it more likely for that page to be included in the main index, even if it has a relatively low PageRank score. Cooke-cutter Descriptions are an indicator of a low quality page that is ripe for the Supplemental Index.

 

meta tags will not effect your google serp

 

It's good to hear an official statement from Google about meta keywords, good to know that they are not that important. Now I can sleep better

 

It does in the comments though - read #2 - it confirms that Google definitely ignores meta keyword tag

 

Metas are not important anymore. Actually I kept on belivening that at least meta description has some value, but I have ran a test few days ago and I have proven ( okay, I was pushed from behind by Cristian Mezei ) that meta description is kept on pages just because its a factor that increases the click rate.

My article is a meta description importance test and I think you have all the urls you need there. For me, at this point, this chapter of meta matters is closed.

 

Does other SE check Meta tags???

 

Years ago, when I first started out making websites, I used all the meta tags ( in particular keywords and description ). Over the years as the number of sites I was making continously grew, and my time was short, I never bothered with them any more.

However, about a year ago when I was fixing up one of my sites, I decided to see how the pages would perform if I had unique keyword and description meta tags on each page. I doubt that the keyword tag did much, but I have to admit that I think the description tag really gave me a boost in my SERPs. As well as displaying "my" description on the SERPs, Google was also highlighting/making bold, the search terms in my description tag.

My views are that though they probably offer a little with regards to the SERPs, it won't hurt to use them, and this is what I have started doing again now. They take less than a minute to do, and I am sure that my sites are actually getting some benefit from them.

 

Nicely put Alex and I would agree that unique title and description tags certainly do add value and should not be over looked.

 

Of course they do.. Because all the codes are being crawled by the SEs...

This meta tags are somewhat not important to Google but to other still counts... and There's no harm even if you put meta tags...

 

Metas are not important for SEO, descriptions can get you out of the supplementals but that is all. Rest is just matter of SEM.

 

I think your giving pretty bad advice here, if you think that meta-tags are pointless for SEO.

I see that your using meta-tags in all the sites listed in your sigs.

I would agree that some are completely useless, especially the one called meta "revisit-after" that's a real waste of code.

http://www.seoconsultants.com/meta-tags/revisit-after.asp

Still each to their own theory i guess.

 

I use meta description because it increases the click rate, so its not a bad factor in the page, yet meta description is not important for SEO. I have wrote an article about meta description ( I used to have the same opinion as you have now about description ) and I have ran a test and I guess you can see the results.

 

Correct.. Good description increases click rate!!