One of my coworkers has fallen into a trap that has claimed the common sense of many SEO professionals. It baffles me that some people believe they can secretly manipulate how and when search engines index or rank their content by using special meta tags. In case you’re wondering, meta tags are a legitimate tool that web developers use to markup and optimize their content for search engines. Here’s the Wikipedia definition:
Meta elements are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section of an HTML or XHTMLdocument. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes.
The key phrase here is “any other metadata.” So, when writing HTML or XHTML webpages it is technically allowable to describe or identify whatever-the-hell-you-want about “Page X” using meta tags. Many years ago this was an excellent way to explain things to search engines so that they could categorize your websites and deliver more relevant results in their indexes.
Eventually, the internet started to revolutionize the way the world did business, and where there’s money to be made people find ways to exploit. For example, the once useful “keywords” meta tag was used to help search engines know what search terms were most relevant to your content. Eventually webmasters started stuffing the most commonly-searched-for terms into their keywords tag–even if those terms had nothing to do with their own content. This worked like a charm for a while, until the big search engines eventually decided that they could not display reliable search results to their users.
For many years now the keywords meta tag has been ignored for ranking by the most commonly used search engines. It is actually still used for retrieval (not ranking) by Yahoo.com and Ask.com, and I found this article that explains the difference in more detail, but you can suffice to say that it’s relatively useless. People still use it, however, and I can’t really blame them: there’s a lot of circulated misinformation and confusion about the tag.
Now for the best part, and this is where my coworker fits into the scene.
Since meta tags can be used to describe anything you want about the page, somewhere along the line some really (really) crazy meta tags started cropping up on the web. A few of them look okay at first glance, but a little rational thought should help dissuade a real web designer from using them. On the other hand, some of these are so stupid that I really think they were invented by a prankster web designer and they somehow got stuck in the internets for good (as does most bullshit).
I need to mention that my coworker is very good at his job (he’s an SEO guy) (no I am not one, per se). He has developed premium and effective internet marketing campaigns for some big customers. You can imagine my surprise when I opened up the source for one of his current projects, and I see this:
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />
<title>–edited for anonymity–</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”–edited for anonymity–” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”–edited for anonymity–” />
<meta name=”title” content=”–edited for anonymity–” />
<meta name=”subject” content=”–edited for anonymity–” />
<meta name=”abstract” content=”–edited for anonymity–” />
<meta name=”classification” content=”–edited for anonymity–” />
<meta name=”alexa” content=”100″ />
<meta name=”googlebot” content=”all, index, follow” />
<meta name=”pagerank” content=”10″ />
<meta name=”revisit” content=”1 days” />
<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”1 days” />
<meta name=”robots” content=”all, index, follow” />
<meta name=”serps” content=”1, 2, 3, 10, 11, 12, 13, 20, ATF” />
<meta name=”page-name” content=”–edited for anonymity–” />
Everything starts off okay. Content-Type, Title, and Description are all valid and useful tags. Of course Keywords shows it’s face, but I’ll give him a pass. It’s all downhill from there.
I don’t know why you’d want to identify a redundant/useless Title meta tag when there is already a perfectly good Title tag. Subject and Abstract seem to be variations of the Description tag, ergo redundant ergo useless. Classification seems to be a variation of the useless Keywords tag.
And now things go from misguided to wtf?
The mysterious Alexa tag apparently will make your alexa ranking magically improve for no reason other than the fact that you included the Alexa tag in your markup. The same thing applies to the Pagerank tag.
To be fair, there is a such thing as a googlebot meta tag, but it is only used to tell googlebot NOT to index or follow your content. If googlebot has already arrived at your website, it’s going to crawl your page without you having to tell it to do so. Along the same vein are the Revisit and Revisit-after tags, which supposedly tell search engines how often to come back and crawl the site. The content on the internet is growing in size exponentially. Search engines have developed very sophisticated algorithms that determine how relevant and unique your content is, and how often they need to crawl your website. Do you think Google is going to throw out that analysis because you told it to come back to your page every day? If this worked, everyone would use it. How could any search engine possibly crawl every page on the internet, once per day?
The robots tag is similar to the googlebot tag. I don’t even want to try to fully explain the Serps (search engine results page) tag: it has something to do with telling search engines exactly where on the page you want to be indexed, and it’s bullshit. Page-name is another exorcise in redundancy.
I pointed these out to him and tried to spare his ego by explaining tactfully yet logically why most of them were worthless. All I got were some blank stares, a few “but but but…” and “Yahoo still uses some of these.” Seriously?
If any web developers or SEO people happen to find this article, take five minutes and revist the meta tags you’ve used and are currently using in your projects. Ask yourself if the meta tags look like voodoo, or if they are designed to manipulate search engine results. If so delete them. Or, since the search engines ignore them all anyway, have fun with it! Make up some really cool/funny meta tags like the Bacon meta tag, or the All-Your-Base-Are-Belong-To-Us meta tag. At least then people who know better won’t think of you as an idiot. Or as a sheep, I haven’t decided yet.
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