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?"

sure, i do.

[IRNI]

they have helped index my sites just the way i like them in relevant search engines.

redirects/refreshes?

[StuffYourReligion]

Er, um, I use them for redirects/page refreshes

Gone off the deep end.

[los furtive]

Just because some people exploit them doesn't mean they aren't relevent. They are still an important ingredient of HTML soup.

Still valuable on intranets

[dbj]

Within a corporation, having meta-tags can greatly enhance the ability to search internal documents.

Intranet sites

[vtlidl]

I still use them on a handful of client intranet sites where I only want to search for the values of the metatags, not the content page.

For example if have an intranet site with thousands of ducments about various hardware compements. All of the hardware has a part number and all documents pertaining to that hardware have the part number in the metatags.

Re:Of course!

[gmack]

Mentioning your site every chance you get on slashdot probably did more for your ranking than using a tag that google is known to ignore.

Metatags still useful

[ChaosDiscord]

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 [google.com] decides to index the University of Wisconsin at Madison web sites [google.com], 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.

Re:redirects/refreshes?

[Zeinfeld]

Er, um, I use them for redirects/page refreshes

Which is one of the things they are there for.

META was never intended to be the primary key for search engines. The idea that search engines should believe a page with a billion Meta tags is pretty wierd.

The purpose of Meta was to allow people to add their own search terms to a document for their own convenience. That use is not invalidated just because Google and Co can't find a way to use that information any more than the existence of spam does not invalidate the idea of email.

Re:redirects/refreshes?

[FTL]

> Er, um, I use them for redirects/page refreshes

Read the article. It is only talking about keyword meta tags. There are lots of other types of meta tags. The Slashdot title is misleading.

Legitimate uses for Keywords meta tag

[Vadim Makarov]

Too bad search engines are dropping them altogether. Keywords tag used to be an appropriate place to put misspellings, alternative and supplementary terms that should not appear as a visible text on the page.

Without keywords tag, you are left with e.g. this solution [useit.com] (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!

Re:Of course!

[greymond]

only as long as your karma is:

positive (mostly affected by bullshitting really well)

Declaring the Death of Any Technology??

[Alethes]

"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.

Re:Meta tags aren't so useful

[Coplan]

This is one of those cause effect things. What you say is true in most cases. But that's only because good search engines started doing their own cataloging and ignoring the meta tags. Prior to meta tags, I remember WebCrawler did a text search, so webmasters would add REM statements into their HTML and stuff words into there. Then came meta tags, and it was much easier to do, as the next generation of search engines utilized that feature. The current generation doesn't do that so often. Thus, meta tags do very little for rankings.

The meta tags could be useful again, if there were some limitations. Say, perhaps, we were limited to 5 description tags, and as an industry standard, the remainder were ignored. Supposing a web search categorized your site based on these five tag descriptions...webmasters would have to get far more picky about what they stuff into their tags.

A Client Story

[limekiller4]

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.

A legitmate use of metatags: ADA compliance

[cyberchucktx]

There's a definite legitimate use of metatags for web pages: ADA compliance.

For those with limited vision (or blindness), screen readers can (and usually do) use metatags to aid in navigation and content descriptions.

For anyone who's interested, check out the W3C site on Web Accessibility Guidelines at:

W3C Web Accessbility Guidelines [w3.org]

Re:redirects/refreshes?

[stridebird]

I think you misunderstand the issue. Where meta tags are used for redirects they are emulating HTTP headers, which is a valid use for them and will remain so imho.

What we are talking about here is _metadata_, expressed in _META_ tags, and the purpose of this is to aid information discovery: to classify and identify the resource requested (or sought). To this end, the uses of metadata as expressed in the HEAD section of a webpage has never been well-supported (search engines excluded once upon a time) and has never taken advantage of any structured schema (ok well keywords/description may be taken as a schema...).

The real money is found in other protocols, where the metadata record only is transferred between parties and only in the end usage scenario is the actual resource identifier summoned. This requires a whole extra element of trust as the identifiers are not checked except, perhaps, when the initial metadata record is created. And note the resource itself need not be burdened with any metadata payload - the client can do nothing with that in anycase.

pete