Search engines does not ignore meta tags. But the people who ask whether Google ignores meta tags may be looking for different answers.
For example, some people may want to know if they should use meta tags on their Web pages. A lot of SEOs will tell you yes (or no). Not many people will take the time to share with you what they feel meta tags really are.
If you support the idea that complying with W3C standards is a good thing for Web sites, then you should use the W3C definition for meta tags. They say that meta tags (actually “meta elements”) use the Search engines currently pay attention to three meta tags:
1. meta description can be used in conjunction with robots to guide search engines in what to show searchers
2. meta keywords is still indexed by Ask and Yahoo!. Googlers have said their search engine ignores the tag but you may want to steer clear of overloading it with unrelated keywords nonetheless.
3. meta robots allows you to provide page-specific directives to search engines on how to handle your links (follow or nofollow), your copy (index, noindex, archive, noarchive), and major directory descriptions for your site (noodp and noydir).
Search engine optimization is not merely concerned with obtaining high rankings for targeted expressions. SEO also looks at how your site is presented by the search engine. You want to understand how using the meta description and meta robots elements (tags) can help or hinder your search visibility and conversions.
In addition, the search engines may conclude you have duplicate content on your site if all your meta description tags are the same or similar. Creating significantly unique text in your meta descriptions can make or break your site’s usability in site search and broad query sets.
The meta keywords tag is another place for you to include relevant terms but don’t be surprised if Ask and Yahoo! favor other pages because of different criteria. The meta keywords element provides the least value of the three but is not entirely worthless (as some people would have you believe).
On the other hand, people asking does Search engines ignore meta tags may be wondering if their efforts to force Google to display their meta description are for nought. After all, any page is relevant to a potentially large number of words and expressions so it’s very possible (and for many pages quite likely) that Google will create a snippet based on data not included in the meta description for obscure query results.
You cannot prevent Google’s use of other text to create that snippet but you can certainly influence which text Google is likely to use for alternative descriptive snippets by studying your search referrals and embedding relevant text for secondary expressions in your body copy. Don’t do this randomly. Rather, use the keyword referral strings to help enhance your body copy and improve the odds that you really are providing information people are looking for.
If people ask “does Google ignore meta tags” because they have seen a debate in some forum or blog over meta tags, they may still be learning the basic principles of search engine optimization. It may not be enough simply to tell them why you would or would not use meta tags on your pages.
If you want to know does meta author matter then I would say that it does not matter for the major search engines. At least, I have never seen a site that ranked for an author’s name on the basis of the meta author content. The meta author element is not really useful, in my opinion, because when used properly it won’t improve relevance for valuable expressions.
And that’s what I would say in response to the question Does Google ignore meta tags?.
Required Meta Tags Exist :
Monday, September 28, 2009
Meta Tags
Posted by seodeveloper at 8:21 PM
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