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?"

Re:redirects/refreshes?

[Anonymous Cowrad]

Use url rewriting [apache.org] for redirects, it saves on HTTP transactions.

Of course.

[drhairston]

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.

what about the w3c ?

[stud9920]

Does anyone (except porn sites) actually use them anymore ?

What about the w3c [w3.org] ? To be fully compliant, with no warning whatsoever, with html 4.01 transitional, I had to add this line to my pages :

<META http-equiv="Content-Type" Content="text/html; charset=us-ascii">

But I guess that slashcode is not the w3c 's best friend [w3.org]

Re:sure, i do.

[damiam]

Doesn't work anymore [google.com].

Re:Of course.

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean Berners-Lee.

for others:
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

not all meta tags

[self assembled struc]

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.

Re:redirects/refreshes?

[larien]

Use url rewriting for redirects, it saves on HTTP transactions.

Yup, they're great, except when you don't have control of the web site, i.e. you're using a web server provider. In that case, a META tag is your only choice. Well, there is Javascript, but the META tag is more generic.

No discussion on Meta Tags is complete without...

[Carnage4Life]

... a reference to the awesome Meta Crap article [well.com] which highlights very clearly the problems with relying on <META> tags for useful information.

Once for redirects... Still for Smart Tags

[Dr. Transparent]

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" />

Re:Refresh is evil

[Tablizer]

Are there any legitimate uses of [auto] refresh?

Stock updates, auction standings, currency rate monitoring, remote alarms, ASCII football, slashdot karma ratings, etc.

utf-8

[Anonymous Coward]

netscape navigator, mozilla et al. still screw up unicode if the appropiate meta tag isnt set.

just my 2 eurocents...

Re:Metatags still useful

[leviramsey]

Uh Google already shows the meta description in their search results.

Re:Images described by using the "keywords" meta t

[migurski]

That's what the ALT attrbute is for: text that is parsed by robots and search engines in place of the image.

Re:sure, i do. / Google easter eggs...

[jazzmanjac]

Check out these google easter eggs:

http://www.google.com/intl/xx-bork/ [google.com]
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-elmer/ [google.com]
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-piglatin/ [google.com]
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/ [google.com]

Meta is quite useful, thank you

[lemkebeth]

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="[e-mail]">

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.

Re:Hell yes

[Captain Large Face]

You should really use <LINK> tags for this purpose. For example:

<link rel="Author" href="authors-page.html" type="text/html">

That way, you get a whole page!