Declaring The Death of Metatags 322
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?"
Of course! (Score:4, Interesting)
They're used... (Score:2, Interesting)
Much like security, I think this is the kind of thing that hackers and tinkerers will always find a way to exploit. The question is who can stay ahead in the race?
used them all the time at the dotcom i worked at (Score:1, Interesting)
of course, other search engines ignored them, and quite often we used custom tags, but when working with 3rd party software, they were (and are, since the dotcom still somewhat exists) a godsend.
Canadian Federal Government (Score:1, Interesting)
Hell yes (Score:4, Interesting)
Some of them are pretty much mandatory, like <meta NAME="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" CONTENT="true"> - I don't want M$ fucking up [slashdot.org] my pages (they don't help right now, but they don't hurt in the future, and I keep the meta tag in a template). I also usually rate sites with PICS [icra.org], so I use their tag.
I also really enjoy when a site author or designer (hopefully with the client's full knowledge) credits him/herself with a meta tag. It's a nice, inconspicuous way to do it, 'specially if the client doesn't want to put a visible credit in the UI.
So yeah, meta tags as search engine spam have been dead for a while, but they have many other uses.
Synonyms (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Uh, are they only used for search engines? (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess if the only value you see to these tags is as a way to manipulate the search engine results, then yeah, maybe a case could be made to do away with them. But meta tags can be used for a whole lot more -- other people mentioned using them to refresh or redirect pages, but there are other goodies too. For example, I encourage my developers to drop this onto each page: "name='developer' content='Employee Name'" -- it's an ego stroke for developers to be able to show that off to their friends. Also, the copyright can be put into a meta tag. Why? Because it isn't visual, so all the clueless newbies who copy the site with a GUI tool will fail to remove that tag. We catch a few people that way, although only the most stupid.
For a while, at Borland, I had a pretty low-end (but working) content-management system, where I put an expiration date into a meta tag along with an author name, and then had a Perl script that flagged any out of date file and emailed the author. This was brute-force Perl recursing through the htdocs folder and reading in each file, so it wasn't database-backed, but in 1995 my boss thought it was hot. Nowadays there are better ways to do most everything, and meta tags are not required for much, but they are still a very useful option, and allow for some creativity -- regardless of search engines.
Images described by using the "keywords" meta tag (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Googlebombing works better (Score:2, Interesting)
I actually managed to pull off a wholey unplanned yet quite effective googlebomb in the last few months. A side project of mine, Quizilla [quizilla.com], has ome feature where it give you HTML coede to past into your weblog. Well, since Quizilla is a free service , I put an advetising string in that HTML, "brought to you by Quizilla", with a link to the site.
Well, through some circumstances that got really popular really quick and people were pasting a lot og this HTML into their pages.. and what happened when Google indexed all those pages?
Instant Googlebomb.
I'm kinda sad I wasn't selling anything, or else I'd be rich.
The "Description" Metatag: still pretty useful.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [google.com]. 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.
metatags shoud be used (Score:3, Interesting)
A Better Way? (Score:2, Interesting)
Metadata is valuable for many things (Score:2, Interesting)
This summer I wrote a perl module called FileMetadata (available from CPAN) that collects metadata from files. I have used it to ease content management headaches on my website. Each HTML (XHTML) file has metadata that is used to advertise it on my site's index pages. I have ideas for more nifty things that can be done with metadata but as always time is finite.
Time to proclaim the death of web pages content? (Score:2, Interesting)
It would probably be far more useful to begin black listing sites who try to divert traffic their ways by means of "lies". Something along the line the anti-spam lists that are in use for email.
If they're useless, then you're using them wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, just because "keywords" tags can be fraudulently specified, doesn't mean that they are useless. I can publish pr0n in a book titled "Undergraduate Physics"; does that make book titles useless? The fault is not in the "keywords" tag; the fault is in naively trusting unverified data. It's okay to put lollipops from the store in your mouth, but it's not okay to do the same with lollipops that you pick out of the gutter.
OK, my turn now. I wish somebody would call a moratorium on printing an entire webpage in a teensy weensy font. I have carefully specified my default font size, because that is the size which is most appropriate for reading long pages of text on my monitor with my eyes. It's okay to make stuff smaller if it's supposed to be "the fine print", but for whole articles, please use the default font size.
On meta tags... (Score:3, Interesting)
If I'm on a slow link, I get to see a brief description of the page and then decide if I want to go to it. And if I'm on a slow link I disable flash, scripting, etc. and set cache to a small amount.
It also helps that I use a different browser for slow links. =) (Nope, not IE, Mozilla or Opera.)
Yes, I do (Score:3, Interesting)
Last I checked they were still pretty common-place (Score:2, Interesting)
Last I checked, a lot of the big-guys still use them as well (Cisco, RedHat, Microsoft, Mandrake, and SourceForge for example)
How KEYWORDs could have been useful (Score:3, Interesting)
In my opininion it would still be possible to turn this thing around. If a couple of big search engines plastered an announcement all over their sites: "We only look at the first ten uniqe meta-keywords", things might change for the better.