NYCPHP Meetup

[tedd]

At 4:17 PM -0700 4/24/06, inforequest wrote:

><meta name="robots" content="noindex, nocache, follow"> is an important
>meta tag today for all the major search engines.

No offense meant, but this meta-tag is just plain dumb.

When a robot visits your page, they are there to do one job and 
that's to index your site -- why tell a robot to do something that 
they are there to do anyway?

If you want to forbid robots from indexing portions of your site, 
then use directives in robot.txt. But, if you think that the above 
meta-tag is an important meta-tag and one that is considered 
important by ALL the major search engines, then think again, it's not.

If you want to use meaningful meta-tags, then consider the following:

  <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" >

That with most browsers, places a nice icon in the viewer's url.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;> charset=utf-8">

This set's your char-set for your site -- nice to have for unicode characters.

  <meta name="Content-Language" content="EN">

This is nice to have for setting the language and (to bring this 
on-topic) can be used by php/ajax for changing language settings on 
the fly.

<meta name="Keywords" content="fly fishing, flies, fly tying 
materials, fly fishing tackle, fly accessories, saltwater, 
freshwater, salmon, trout">

  <meta name="description" content="fly fishing flies for saltwater & 
freshwater flyfishing, tying materials, and other resources.">

Keywords and description tags can be useful for some search engines, 
but not ALL search engines consider them. In addition, meta-tags can 
hurt if you don't know how to use them -- like using the same keyword 
more than three times in a tag (i.e., such as "fly" in the above 
meta-tag). Some SE's consider that spamming and will treat your site 
accordingly.

Additionally, there are many different methods of using php, 
php/ajax, css, javascript to present selected text to SE's while 
presenting something different to the viewer.

For example, expert SEO guru's say that keywords count more when 
placed in paragraphs toward the beginning of your text content. 
However, by using css, you can place paragraphs anywhere you want in 
the html (for a SE perspective) and have those paragraphs appear in a 
different positions to the viewer. A trick that SE's won't detect and 
even with a personal review, there's nothing wrong with using css to 
rearrange things -- css' purpose is to separate style from content, 
right?

You can drive yourself crazy trying to figure out what to do with 
meta-tags -- testing, changing, testing, but in the end there's no 
guaranteed formula that will work, regardless of what the SEO guru's 
(with a vested interest) will say.

The truth is, that meta-tags are not actually needed. As a test, not 
that one test is conclusive, I created a site that has a current 
PageRank of 5 without ANY meta-tags whatsoever and without even 
submitting the site to a single search engine -- explain that.

The explanation is that robots index sites, on their own time table, 
and make their own assessments regardless of meta-tags. SE's method 
of evaluating sites is a dynamic process continuously in a state of 
flux and is certainly not constrained, limited, or influenced greatly 
by the use of meta-tags. We've gone far past that.

tedd

-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://sperling.com