__/ [Philip Ronan] on Wednesday 23 November 2005 21:11 \__
> "Laphan" wrote:
>
>> Hi All
>>
>> Do any of the search engines actually look at the meta tags anymore, eg
>> abstract, description, rating, etc??
I only see the immediate effect of specifying/changing page description. I
have been told many times that other meta tags get altogether ignored, but I
have little personal evidence to support it. I bet that people have
experimented with that and wrote it in books, so it is no longer a
contention.
>> If so, which ones?
>
> Google uses the description as a page summary if there are no keywords to
> match, but I think the general consensus if that it doesn't towards the
> SERP though. It helps if you make sure each page has it's own individual
> description.
I didn't know that this can affect deep pages significantly. When I get to
think about it, you are right. If the overall number of pages is small, it
is probably worth spending the time entering a description that will reflect
well on the content and entice people to follow through to your site from a
results page.
> I'm not sure if the keywords have much benefit any more. Filling this tag
> with dozens of words that don't appear in the body text is liable to get
> your page removed from the search engine listings altogether.
Penalties? That's interesting. Seems plausible too. A page containing
<meta name="KEYWORDS" content="sex viagra sex xxx SEX XxX">
or even something more subtle like
<meta name="KEYWORDS" content="money cheap dollar free discount">
should lose credibility from the very start. It is more likely to be
administered by a spammer or involve immoral parties.
>> Does this revisit one actually work?
>
> I doubt it. Maybe if you put in a *large* value then some robots won't
> crawl your site so often, but if you think you can use this tag to make the
> robots come back any faster than they otherwise would, then forget it.
Yes, everyone would have wanted to (successfully) include plenty of sales
junk in keywords and be crawled every 1 day. Meta tags, however, can be
useful as they tag your site. Some services I have seen use them as a sort
of site profile.
Roy
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