Are meta tags really dead?

[salientdigital]

I was just reading a SiteProNews article in my Gmail account. For those of you who don't use Gmail, along the top and right sides of your email inbox & view page you get adwords ads relevant to the content of the email. (Funny side note: viewing the spam folder you get spam recipes - honest!)

I found it interesting that in an SEO-related article, there would be an ad for someone's (this is not a pitch) www.google-secrets.com/google-secrets-metatags.htm, which boldly proclaims, 'Meta Tags are dead so why are you still using them?"

Of course, if you view source, they have a meta description tag at the top of their page... lol.

Bottom line... are they stupid or am I?

[St0n3y]

They are. The keyword tag is largely useless but who knows if/when it might be useful again. The description tag may not effect search results by much but it is still often pulled and used in the SERPs. I would never go without a meta description tag.

[IgorMordkovich]

Salient, Stoney is right. Keyword tags ... almost useless, but description should be used "not spammed".

I tested this a week ago. For few pages that had duplicate description tag I updated it with natural, non-spam description that had a fair amount of keywords in it. Not too long, not too short. In result, the main page was effected and moved by 1-2 positions. Could be coincidence and maybe it was not.

In anyway, you do want to use the description meta not only for SEO but for usability by vision impaired and people using other devices. It just makes your site better. Use it.

[evilgreenmonkey]

The keyword meta tag can still be used for topic targetting, although will not add weight to your ranking. You can see which search engines take a peak by entering totally off-topic terms into the keyword meta tag of a content weak page. SafeSearch also looks at keyword meta tags on a couple of engines.

:cool:

Rob

[Robert_Charlton]

The description is often the source of snippets that appear in the serps to describe your site. Tuning your descriptions to return attractive snippets over a variety of likely search terms is something of an art. It's worth the effort for that reason, but it doesn't appear at the moment that the description helps you to rank on those terms.

In my opinion, the meta keywords tag is not useful for competitive rankings... but I generally do the tag anyway, just in case some directory somewhere decides to use it.

Most meta keyword tags I've seen aren't nearly focussed enough, and, if they were given weight by the engines, most such keyword tags would hurt more than they'd help.

[Chris Boggs]

another vote Yay for Description tags and Nay for KW tag. For the fear of this looking like a rare simple "me too" post, the rest have already about summed it up, IMO. One other thing that could be a decision factor in not using your KW tag is competition sniffing about...obviously if all your top competitors are already using them you would know that.

[glengara]

I keep reading how a generic description tag can cause pages to go supplemental in G, though nothing about problems from not having a description tag...

[evilgreenmonkey]

I keep reading how a generic description tag can cause pages to go supplemental in G, though nothing about problems from not having a description tag...

I think of meta descriptions like PPC creative, it can actually have a big impact on your organic CTR. Do you really want Google to choose this for you? In my experience this somtimes results in a page description containing the alt text from a logo and copyright warnings for the page footer. Not exactly tempting to clickthrough to.

:cool:

Rob

[leonus]

The first time i started hearing the meta tags are dead i tested it on a page that i needed to rank

I removed all tags including title with a generic site name title and tried to rank it i got it on the second page with ease during the usual time i expected it to rank.

Then i stopped any kind of linking

Now i added the keyword tag with my keywords

Waited two weeks nothing happened

Now i added description tag again waited two weeks nothing happened

Then i added my keyword in the title tag

and it was number 3 two days later.

I let other decide what works for them

[St0n3y]

Don't be fooled by the lack of "performance" from the description tag. It has other uses. Primarily that of having some control over the description used in the SERPs.