Extra metatags

Are they a waste of space?

[namniboose]

I put the following metatags on my site and I'm not sure if they are just a waste of space. What use do they have, if any? I understand that the author and email address is shown to Mozilla users - any other reason to have them on there? Thanks for any advice.

<META NAME="REVISIT-AFTER" CONTENT="30 days">
<META name="AUTHOR" content="name">
<META name="CONTACT_ADDRESS" CONTENT="emailaddress">
<META name="DISTRIBUTION" CONTENT="Global">
<META name="RESOURCE-TYPE" CONTENT="Document">
<META name="RATING" CONTENT="General">

[mivox]

I'd have to say "yes" to the waste of space question. SE spiders ignore "revisit-after" tags and the rest are just not necessary... it looks better to have your contact info out in the open on your own sites, and if you're trying to put contact info on sites you've designed to attract more business, most potential client will never think of looking at the metas to find it.

Just my $0.02. :)

[namniboose]

Thanks for that Mivox. What about:

<META name="DISTRIBUTION" CONTENT="Global">
<META name="RESOURCE-TYPE" CONTENT="Document">
<META name="RATING" CONTENT="General">

Pointless too?

[mivox]

Yup. :)

[mbauser2]

Didn't we just have this thread?

<META name="DISTRIBUTION" CONTENT="Global">
<META name="RESOURCE-TYPE" CONTENT="Document">

For use with site-index.pl and item-index.pl, to feed data to Aliweb. If you don't know what I'm talking about, they're completely useless to you. (Even if you do know what I'm talking about, they're probably useless to you. Aliweb's been comatose for years.)

<META name="RATING" CONTENT="General">

A monumentally stupid use of META. Not implemented by anybody sane. Suffers from two contradicatory labeling schemes (Weburbia's and Vancouver Webpages's). Too simplistic for the real world. Etc, etc.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If you don't know exactly what the tag is for, and you don't know anybody who's using it, don't bother including it.

[keyplyr]

I've been designing webpages for 4 years.

The first few years I spent searching the web grabbing little snips of code and tags that looked like they did something important, adding all these gems to my pages. More was better!

The last year or so I have spent removing all that surperflous crap that was weighing down my pages, opting for CSS and a more streamlined design: clean, succinct, fast loading pages!

[namniboose]

Yes, Keyplyr, that is where I'm at. Trying to streamline.

Slapped on some useful-looking metatags from other people without knowing exactly what they were for. Now, a year later, with the low season (June!) finally here I've finally got time to look at what I've done (and laugh!).

[richlowe]

I believe the answer is straightforward. YOu need to understand what ANY element does before you should use it. You also need to understand what you are attempting to accomplish. Once you understand these two things, you can make an intelligent decision on whether the element is useful for your purposes or not. It's never wise to just include meta tags (or any other tag) without a thorough understanding of their purpose and how they are used on the internet.

Everyone will give you a different opinion as to their value - only you can make the decision, and it must be based upon your own goals for your site.

Richard Lowe

[namniboose]

Yes, Richard, that is why I am asking here what their function is! So that I can decide whether to include them!

Getting a variety of opinions is simply food for thought. I am the last person to take one person's word for it.

I got into making and optimizing my own site when the 'professionals' we hired let us down, which is why I slapped on a few extra metatags used by other successful sites, in the belief that they wouldn't actually do any harm, until I had the time to look more deeply into the subject and decide it they are appropriate for my site. This is what I am doing now.

I understand your point about not using anything until you know what you are doing, but if I had waited till I knew what I was doing with my website, I wouldn't have the thriving vacation rental business that I have now! It has served me well to plunge in and learn from my mistakes (and I've made lots of them). I just keep asking questions and hope I won't get slapped on the wrist too often by the experts!

[edited by: namniboose at 9:43 pm (utc) on June 7, 2002]

[Axacta]

I think Richard makes a good point. I remember when I first started I purchased a service from an SEO company to "fix" my site. One of the fixes was a whole bunch of metatags. They all looked very impressive, and I figured that I was getting my money's worth - that is until I started to investigate SEO for myself. Then I realized I was being ripped off and decided to take things into my own hands. I have read Richard's explanation of the meta tags he uses on another thread, and it sounded reasonable enough to me. The extra tags obviously fit the bill for his site, a rare exception I think, but they are of no use to mine.

[papabaer]

Put your trust... and effort into concise content, user-friendly layout and streamlined, validating code (preferrably XHTML). Trim your meta elements to charset, description and keywords. Use meta keywords (7-10) to help maintain your site theme and focused page topic.

[Axacta]

namniboose,

I don't think anyone has "slapped you on the wrist". There are small topic-specific SE's that these "extra" meta tags may be useful for. It is up to you to discover if your site falls into one of these categories. That is the point I believe Richard was making.

[rewboss]

I've found an unexpected use for reply-to. I got an e-mail from a bot which had taken my e-mail address from a reply-to meta tag and sent me some spam -- did I want my site submitted to about a zillion search engines for a mere gazillion dollars? It included a screenshot.

I recognized the screenshot all right, but not the URL. It turned out that there was a slight misconfiguration on the host, and my site was available at three different addresses. Two of them I'd paid for, the other should have been deleted months before and belonged to someone else entirely.

I always use a content-language meta tag as well as a lang attribute in the <html> tag; I work in German and English, and yes, it can help SEs. Look at Google Deutschland [google.de] -- right under the search box you can choose to search "The Web", "Pages in German" or "Pages from Germany".

[Reno]

Spider-Food has a pretty level headed discussion of meta tags (Meta Tag Optimization Tutorial) at:

[spider-food.net...]

[mbauser2]

Spider-Food's article is pathetic. It's recommending values nobody uses, including the thoroughly-discredited Distribution and Revist-After values.

[Reno]

In their opening paragraphs they say:

============================
"For all the hoopla and concern that goes into creating Meta Tag content, it might surprise you to learn that meta tags aren't nearly as important as most people believe....

It was a pretty good idea, but the concept was so quickly abused by spammers, that search engines had to dramatically decrease the relevancy of the meta tag content in their algorithm just to keep their search results vaguely accurate.

...Meta Tags are not the win-all-lose-all battle of search engine optimization. In fact, some major search engines do not read them at all."
============================

This does not appear (to me at least) to be terribly different from your own words:

============================
"I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If you don't know exactly what the tag is for, and you don't know anybody who's using it, don't bother including it."
============================

Regarding the "Revisit" tag, they correctly point out, as you do, that it's a wasted tag:

============================
"Revisit
<meta name="revisit-after" content="X days">

This meta tag is designed to tell a spider how often to revisit. However, most if not all spiders ignore it."
============================

So given how much of their advice is directly echoing your own, it seems your assessment of "pathetic" might be a bit strong.