Hi Forum It's common knowledge that little if any consideration is give to the Keyword Meta Tag. The reasons for this were due to keyword spamming, i.e. webmasters stuffing 100's or keywords and phrases into the tags just to get found on the SE's. More often than not, these keywords and key phrases were not repeated on the visible page and sometime unrelated to its content, hence the tag losing its useful purpose. However, I've noticed that on Social networking sites and common blogs, it's encouraged to add what are called 'Tags' which are little more than keywords and key phrases related to the page content. It doesn't seem to matter whether the actual words are on the visible page so long as they are related in some way. Are TAGS therefore, not simply the on-page version of the keyword Meta Tag? If so, doesn't this mean that they too are at risk of eventually getting ignored by major search engines as the spammers and scammers abuse this facility? And finally, as TAGS seem to be specific to social networking sites and Blogs, including video upload projects, could a static website not then reserve an area on its page(s) and call it Tags, then cram it full of related search terms so it too could get crawled and compete with those Blogs and social networking sites? Any views, and or firsthand knowledge of this is much appreciated. Aitch
An interesting and thought-provoking question. If the search engines are indexing the tags, then they are opening themselves to abuse just like the meta keywords tags. But just because it has been abused doesnt mean there is a reason for ignoring or banning it altogether, which is what google has done (ignoring all the meta keywords tags). Just because the internet has been used for spreading malware, viruses, and crapware doesnt mean we stop using the internet. Just because meta keywords tags are spammed full of stuff by webmasters is not a reasonable reason to ignore indexing it or taking them into account altogether.
Interesting thoughts, thanks for sharing. I'm still curious though If a static webpage had and area stuffed with Tags (as do social networking sites and Blogs), whether or not that page would get delisted, or lose rankings. After all, a bunch of keywords and phrases crunched togther do not form eligible sentence structure and make no sense as a read. That alone might get the home-made tags crawled and marked as on-page SPAM, although on the afore mentioned sites they are obviously recognised simply as TAGS whose sole purpose is, to quote Google's YouTube definition; Tags help you label videos you upload so that other people can find them more easily. I can verify that those very same tags are not only used for on-site searches. They also get the videos found when conducting a search on Google, Yahoo, or BING Search Engines etc for those very keywords and phrases that are added to the TAGS area. I guess the best thing to do is to try it on a site or a page on a site, that has little value or profitably. Cheers Aitch
The rationale or logic for counting meta tags as keywords for scoring is that, the search engine already knows about the content of the page because those words occur on the page. But search engine may not be able to think of some LSI keywords which a human can think of. The LSI keywords describe page content using CSV of keyword lists. these LSI words may not occur as part of page content. Even they can be spammed. It is up to the engine to make intelligent decisions as to whether the LSI keywords in the meta keywords are legitimate, reasonable and different from spammy keywords. I think current technology is able to do that. Able to make that judgment or distinction call. So why would anyone want to ban or ignore meta keywords totally?