Does filling out HTML meta description/keyword tags matter for SEO?
This article has some info on it.
A quick summary for keywords is:
Google and Microsoft: No
Yahoo and Ask: Yes
Edit: As noted below, the meta description is used by Google to describe your site to potential visitors (although may not be used for ranking).
Google will use meta tags, but the description, to better summarize your site. They won't help to increase your page rank.
See:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=79812
EDIT: #Petr, are you sure that meta tags influence page rank? I am pretty sure that they don't, but if you have some references, I'd love to learn more about this. I have seen this, from the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, which is what leads me to believe that they don't:
Even though we sometimes use the
description meta tag for the snippets
we show, we still don't use the
description meta tag in our ranking.
Keywords: Useless
All major search engines don't use them at all.
Description: Useful!
Replaces the default text in search engines if there isn't anything better. Use this to describe the page properly. Not perhaps useful for SEO, but it makes your results look more useful, and will hopefully increase click through rates by users.
If you want your users to share your content on Facebook, the meta tags actually come in handy, as Facebook will use this information when styling the post.
See Facebook Share Partners for more information.
Edit; whoops, wrong url. Fixed.
If your pages are part of an intranet then both the keywords and description meta tags can be very useful. If you have access to the search engine crawling your pages (and thus you can specifically look for sepcific tags/markup), they can add tremendous value without costing you too much time and are easy to change.
For pages outside of an intranet, you may have less success with keywords for reasons mentioned above.
The description meta is important as it is displayed ad-verbatim on Google search results below your site title. The absence of which, Google pulls and shows the first few lines of content on SERPs. The description tag allows you to control what SE users see as a page summary before clicking. This helps in increasing your CTRs from Search.
The keyword meta usefulness is still inconclusive, but SEOers continue to use them. Avoid using more than 5-6 keywords in the tag per page to avoid Google from detecting and penalising due to any suspected keyword dumping.
The problem with keyword meta tags is they are a completely unreliable source of information for search engines. The temptation for people to alter search results in their favour with misleading keywords is just too great.
Those are two of the things that are used by search engines. The exact weight of each changes frequently, they are generally regarded; however, as being fairly important.
One thing to note, care should be taken when entering values. The more relevant the keywords and description are to the textual content of the site, the more weight may be given to them. Of course there are no guarantees as nobody outside of the search engine companies really know what algorithms are being used.
This post talks a bit more about some aspects.
Related
I always put meta keywords on my sites pages. But I have heard rumors that you do not have to do this. Should I continue putting keywords on my pages or is it just a waste of time?
This article says, that Google resigned from using META keywords many years ago due to the fact that they are easily abused.
Quote:
Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of
millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags
completely. They simply don't have any effect in our search ranking at
present.
Well it's true that crawlers such as Google use much more sophisticated methods than simply META tags to decide PageRank and index pages, but I don't think that's any reason to necessarily remove them or not include them.
Other, less sophisticated crawlers may use it as a legitimate source of information, and so I suppose the only clear answer I can give is: if you don't want to limit your visibility to only the well established search engines which don't rely on the tags, then you might as well still include them. As long as you take into account that there are far more important methods of promoting your site (See Google Webmasters Education for example), you'll be fine.
I have added meta tag description in my page, but it is not displaying when I search my page in google.
It is displaying something else from my blog page. Please let me know if any one is aware of this.
Thanks in advance!!
Anand
The meta description is only a hint - it's not guaranteed to be used. If you search for your site like this: site:watchcricket-online.blogspot.com instead, then you'll see the meta description, verifying you've entered it correctly.
The snippet that is shown on the search engine result page depends on the keywords the person searches for, so you can't really target any specific text there.
You should also be aware that Google doesn't actually use the description as part of it's ranking algorithm - words that are in the description don't count as part of the page. (i.e. if your description was wueoqwiueoiuoiauiouwqoeuq, your page wouldn't rank for that term if the only place it was was in the description.)
Google does not always show the meta description. If it finds something better on your site to use, it uses that snippet instead.
Look at this article to learn more.
Google may or may not use meta tag descriptions. Mostly it doesn’t, because experience shows that they are widely used by site authors for excessive and often misleading advertising instead of informative content. But in special cases, especially when there are no useful matches for the search words in content, it may use meta tag descriptions, as you can see by googling with
url:watchcricket-online.blogspot.com
I encountered many sites including stackoverflow.com whose page source do not show META tags like keywords, description.
I am just wandering is it because they blocked it by some sort of tech or they just drop them since, as I know, those tags are not so much valuable as before.
If they blacked them, then what kind of software or tech do they need. If not then how Google extract description from those sites when Google displays search results?
Lot of dumb questions, thanks for your time and reply!
Any input is appreciated!
They're not MATA tags, they're META tags. They are not as important as the actual content of your site and the other sites that link to yours, since it's well known that meta tag content is easier to abuse and misrepresent. Meta elements are more useful in the areas where there is no benefit from such abuse, eg. content encoding or language, but some of this data can be sent by the web server in the HTTP headers anyway. So you rarely, if ever, need any meta elements.
You don't need any sort of technology to 'block' meta tags. Every tag is just a bit of text you insert into your HTML. If you don't want to send out a meta tag, you just don't write it into the HTML.
If you want specific information on how Google views your site then you could start with their webmasters page.
Just had a look around on Google .. may be followings help you something.
Avoid the META keyword tag!
Do not use the meta keywords tag. Many
people still think of this as a quick
fix for SEO. It’s not. Google no
longer uses it. In fact, it is likely
that Google penalizes sites that do
employ the meta keywords tag. Yahoo is
perhaps the only search engine that
still uses the meta keywords tag but
places very little weight on it.
Death of META Tag
pretty old link though
"In the past we have indexed the meta
keywords tag but have found that the
high incidence of keyword repetition
and spam made it an unreliable
indication of site content and
quality. We do continue to look at
this issue, and may re-include them if
the perceived quality improves over
time," said Jon Glick, AltaVista's
director of internet search.
as the title asks
What search engines do and do not read is an industry secret, but I would hazard a guess that the contents of HTML comments are largely, if not totally, ignored.
Certainly you could not stuff comments with loads of keywords hoping you would be ranked on them.
A link here from someone who has investigated this: http://www.seoconsultants.com/html/comments/
A comment from Matt Cutts
"agedia.com : Did you use HTML
comments to index web sites ?
I believe that we have the ability to
index them, but we usually don't index
comments."
(Source: http://chat.abondance.com/google.html)
Some search engines read and parse the content of html comments, but this is mostly used in code search (Google has some features the like, others are koders.com).
If you are worried about the overall page ranking on main engines or keyword search, html comments are generally not considered in search results outside of code search.
Here a discussion: http://codingforums.com/showthread.php?t=71686
Interesting page on search test:
http://www.searchtools.com/test/comments/comment-test.html
Simple answer: it depends.
If you have lots of comments or something else triggering "uh... this page is weird" in the parser. This can cause you to be kicked completely out of google et al. This is because valid and invalid pages on the internet are to be parsed, and anyone actively trying to game the parser should be punished.
So while comments may or may not be parsed, they can affect the ranking in indirect ways. It all depends on the secret sauce in the parser/ranker.
There are other edge cases too. I would not use HTML comments if I were you.
(I have worked in this area for a major search engine)
I was wondering if using HTML entities in meta tags (like keywords and description) is the best way to go?
Does it influence the indexing from search engines?
I'd put the meta tags contents without entities as long as my charset allows the chars. I researched a bit and I found this on Google Webmasters/Site owners help and the example contains £9.24 not £9.24 nor £9.24
As is true that meta tags aren't a big factor for success, they can be a factor for failure. Indexer robots may detect a try of cheat them by using invalid keywords or description. From Wikipedia:
Early versions of search algorithms
relied on webmaster-provided
information such as the keyword meta
tag, or index files in engines like
ALIWEB. Meta tags provide a guide to
each page's content. But using meta
data to index pages was found to be
less than reliable because the
webmaster's choice of keywords in the
meta tag could potentially be an
inaccurate representation of the
site's actual content. Inaccurate,
incomplete, and inconsistent data in
meta tags could and did cause pages to
rank for irrelevant searches. Web
content providers also manipulated a
number of attributes within the HTML
source of a page in an attempt to rank
well in search engines.
The meta description can be used as the default snippet.
The meta keywords are pretty much completely ignored, but everyone still uses them anyway.
Neither will have much (if any) effect on your ranking, but a good meta description could boost your clickthrough.
Entities make difference only in amateur HTML "parsers" done with regular expressions. They aren't problem for Google.
Meta tags are not ignored. There are still read by Google, so I think, they should be used in the proper way. Google loves pages done in proper way, but remember, that meta tag is one of hundreds things that robots take into consideration.
if there are umlaute dont use entities.
i think, google is indexing the word "bremsbeläge" as "bremsbelaege" and "bremsbeläge".
The meta tag "description" does have an effect on the ranking. It is the description that Google gives in the listing, so this is the most important part that influences people to click on your link. When more people click on your link, Google assumes it has more worth for users in the searches and moves you up.