I still have mixed feelings about Meta tags. As an old school webmaster, I think that Meta tags can help when you need to provide some structured information about a web page. In the good old times metadata helped search engines to categorize web pages correctly. But the situation changed in the beginning of our century when web consultants started to pro-actively manipulate Meta tags in order to achieve higher rankings on search engines.
Meta tag and its elements (also called attributes) are still supported by a very limited number of search engines. Yet, most major search engines, like Google, don’t use them for relevance anymore. Our advice is not to take Meta tags and their attributes too seriously as a way of improving your search engine rankings. This still does not mean that we should discard Meta elements completely, because they can still be important for the proper web page structure. As an example, we can point out at language attribute of the Meta tag that gains some importance if the web site uses specific language(s). Search engines may have become more sophisticated but they still consider this tag.
Although Meta tags mostly lost their relevancy, for the time being they still get spidered by MSN and Yahoo. Some of them still matter a little for reasons not directly related to search engine rankings. For example, description attribute of a Meta tag, where the webmaster usually put the description of the web page, helps to improve the user’s experience during searches. The contents of the description appear in the organic search engine listings. Description should not exceed 25-30 words; it must be brief and informative.
In my opinion, the Meta tag attribute keywords gets ignored almost completely by Google, although Yahoo! And MSN still notice it to some degree. Yet even the latter two may start ignoring this tag too and without a short notice. There is no harm to keep this Meta tag on the web page as long as a webmaster adds there no more than 10 – 20 keywords. These keywords need to be represented on the web page though, or this may lower down the rankings.
Note… Apparently, there is still no clarity or consensus about usefulness of keywords attribute. I read in Wikipedia that “37 leaders in search engine optimization concluded in April 2007 that the relevance of having your keywords in the meta-attribute keyword is little to none”.
Historically, the refresh Meta element was used to refresh a web page after a certain time interval. The refresh attribute of a Meta tag is also one of the ways to redirect visitors from your site to another. When used for a long time, the refresh attribute is regarded as unethical SEO practice and this can hurt your ratings.
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