Are meta-tags still important?

[PSiegmann]

Hi,

do meta-tags still count? It seems to me, that search engines nowadays
are overlooking them, and using other means to rank websites.

Does it still make sense to add meta tags to your site?

 

[Sherm Pendley]

Does it still make sense to add meta tags to your site?

It never did. What's the point of trying to "trick" search engines into
indexing words that aren't actually on your site?

sherm--

 

[dorayme]

It never did. What's the point of trying to "trick" search engines into
indexing words that aren't actually on your site?

The point was to try to bring more traffic. The method's success
or morality is a different matter.

But the motivation, even so, was not always bad. Let us suppose
meta tag have some real effect on search engines for one moment:
one might not use some words in the page itself, but want to draw
people who are searching for very closely related things to the
site in case they are searching under synonyms of the words
actually used. There could be all sorts of honourable enough
reasons.

 

[Adrienne Boswell]

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed dorayme

The point was to try to bring more traffic. The method's success
or morality is a different matter.

But the motivation, even so, was not always bad. Let us suppose
meta tag have some real effect on search engines for one moment:
one might not use some words in the page itself, but want to draw
people who are searching for very closely related things to the
site in case they are searching under synonyms of the words
actually used. There could be all sorts of honourable enough
reasons.

I suggested use is misspellings of common words. For a long time, I
could not spell affidavit correctly (heck who's kidding who, I still have
to look it up), so one could put common misspellings for keywords.

The description meta is still used by some search engines, so don't throw
the baby out with bath water.

 

[dorayme]

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed dorayme


I suggested use is misspellings of common words. For a long time, I
could not spell affidavit correctly (heck who's kidding who, I still have
to look it up), so one could put common misspellings for keywords.

The description meta is still used by some search engines, so don't throw
the baby out with bath water.

Yes, common misspellings would have been a good reason.

Only last week, a client was puzzled by how its site came high up
in Google when a word in the plural was used, but not in the
singular. In fact, it might have been partly because the word was
only in the plural form in my main text. I contrived to use as
natural an expression as possible to add a sentence with the
singular which yet would make sense and be useful text to a user.
I had had it in the singular and plural forms for years in the
meta tags to no avail!

 

[Sherm Pendley]

I suggested use is misspellings of common words. For a long time, I
could not spell affidavit correctly (heck who's kidding who, I still have
to look it up), so one could put common misspellings for keywords.

Google's "Did you mean: ..." feature makes that a more or less moot point.

sherm--

 

[dorayme]

Google's "Did you mean: ..." feature makes that a more or less moot point.

er...

 

[Sherm Pendley]

er...

I take that to mean that I didn't make it clear just *how* that makes this
point moot.

If you search Google for the term "affadavid" (i.e. misspelled), you'll get
a link to the correct spelling that says "Did you mean: affidavit."

In other words, Google corrects misspelled search terms for us, so as web
authors we don't need to worry about that.

sherm--

 

[dorayme]

I take that to mean that I didn't make it clear just *how* that makes this
point moot.

If you search Google

It was that I thought it odd to suppose the point was to use meta
tags as a spellcheck. Suely it was to not let a spelling error in
a search field keep folk from the site concerned (on the
assumption, never mind its truth) that meta tags drove search
engines to some extent or some do or did.

 

[Sherm Pendley]

It was that I thought it odd to suppose the point was to use meta
tags as a spellcheck.

It wasn't "the" point, but it certainly was *a* point.

In the absense of Google's spellchecking, and assuming that meta elements
were used, then it's quite reasonable to include popular misspellings in
the meta elements so that one's pages could be found by searching for the
misspelled terms. It was a very popular use of meta elements, back when
Google et al actually cared about them to begin with.

As I said though, it's moot now, because Google's spell check addresses the
problem of incorrectly-spelled search terms by correcting them at the source.
That makes such a workaround unnecessary.

sherm--

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Scripsit Sherm Pendley:

If you search Google for the term "affadavid" (i.e. misspelled),
you'll get a link to the correct spelling that says "Did you mean:
affidavit."

The hypothetically tragicomic part of the story is that if search engines
generally paid attention to meta tags and meta tags were widely used to add
misspellings as "keywords", Google might be unable to distinguish between
correct spelling an misspelling - and might treat them as distinct words.

At present, serious pages spell words mostly right, so "affidavit" is far
more common than "affadavid", so Google can suggest the former when a user
(which is, on the average, less literate than page authors) has typed the
latter. It sees a word with few matches, resembling a considerably more
common word. But if authors tried hard to anticipate misspellings, in meta
tags or in page content, they might make their frequency too large, web
wide. If a word gives million hits, it's usually not sensible to ask the
user whether he actually meant a similar word that gives two million hits.

 

[El Kabong]

(snip)

In the absense of Google's spellchecking, and assuming that meta elements
were used, then it's quite reasonable to include popular misspellings in
the meta elements so that one's pages could be found by searching for the
misspelled terms. It was a very popular use of meta elements, back when
Google et al actually cared about them to begin with.

As I said though, it's moot now, because Google's spell check addresses
the
problem of incorrectly-spelled search terms by correcting them at the
source.
That makes such a workaround unnecessary.

However, the misspelled string _does_ cause Google's algorithm to produce a
slightly different found set. That's not to say that those results are
influenced by the presence or absence of keywords... I've never looked at
the source code of the top sites to see what they were actually doing in
that situation. Nevertheless, the misspelled words do bring back a different
set of results so there must be some variation in causation.

I think, maybe. Being a married man, I'm often wrong.

El

 

[dorayme]

It wasn't "the" point, but it certainly was *a* point.

In the absense of Google's spellchecking, and assuming that meta elements
were used, then it's quite reasonable to include popular misspellings in
the meta elements so that one's pages could be found by searching for the
misspelled terms. It was a very popular use of meta elements, back when
Google et al actually cared about them to begin with.

As I said though, it's moot now, because Google's spell check addresses the
problem of incorrectly-spelled search terms by correcting them at the source.
That makes such a workaround unnecessary.

OK, sherm, it seems I missed your real point.

Yes, sure, but not all search engines do the "Did you mean..."
thingy. I notice Ansearch simply corrects some mistakes without
asking. When I tried "poligrayph", however, it did not find
anything full stop. Google, was smart enough to ask did I mean
"polygraph".

My point here is that while your point about mootness is
interesting and fair enough, it is a moot point how moot it is.

 

[dorayme]

I think, maybe. Being a married man, I'm often wrong.

<http://dorayme.150m.com/jokes/taxiDriver.html>

 

[mbstevens]

My point here is that while your point about mootness is
interesting and fair enough, it is a moot point how moot it is.

Meta-mootations! You must be a LISP programmer.