Does Googlebot Speak Meta?

Are meta tags a complete waist of seo time?

[AkanDian rain]

I just read an article that said...

"Altavista was the last big engine hold-out that used Meta Tags -- and they dropped them in May."

Can anyone confirm this? And more importantly is that true for Google?

[agerhart]

Google does not use the META tags. They use the Title tag for your title, the content to find the keywords, and the content and ODP description for the site's description.

[SlyGuy]

I think it's fair to say that there is no need to use Meta Tags anymore. Especially with Google.

[korkus2000]

Inktomi seems to have recently dropped them as well.

[pageoneresults]

> I think it's fair to say that there is no need to use Meta Tags anymore.

Eek! There are about 1,000 or more SEO's that will go out of business if this is the case! ;)

[bobmark]

I wouldn't drop them just yet.
Inktomi's behaviour has changed dramatically over the past month or so, presumably as a result of the loss of AOL, rumoured financial problems, etc. They seem to be making a big push to improve their index at the cost of disregarding the treatment given to "pay fors". By this I mean that, at one time, you got exactly what you paid for with Inktomi: pay for inclusion of a single page and that's what you got, not your 500 other pages. If you had the cash to pay for spidering of each page in your site, they got indexed.
Recently Inktomi has been crawling all pages in sites only paying for their home page and crawling them regularly. These results show up in msn very rapidly.
My point is, Inktomi is in flux and I would not bet that if they drop indexing metatags this month they won't go back to it next month.

[amoore]

Google certainly does use meta tags.
[google.com...]
They apparently don't use them all, though.

[korkus2000]

Ink has really not used them for months unless thats all there is to index on the page. When they reworked their entire system and algo, their results have been similar to google's. I never did well in ink or av because I never used metas, but I was in the index. Three months ago inktomi started sending me lots of traffic after an update for searches that perform well in google. AV has just started doing the same. I think metas have gone the way of the dinosaur. Killing metas stops the easiest form of spam from a webmaster.

[bobmark]

yeah, you're right amore but I imagine most posters are implicitly referring to the "description" and "keywords" metas.
One contradiction though: it is an article of faith on here that your PR is negatively affected by including metatag keywords that do not appear in the text of your page. However if Google does not read the keywords tag, how can this be?
As someone who has worked in large programming shops (though never a SE) I would think that if Google made a decision - presumably based on efficiency - to ignore certain metatags, they would ignore them totally, not store their info for the sole purpose of calculating PR. That would mean they were expending time on crawling the tags and space on storing the data for a purpose that could be easily accomplished by other means.

[bobmark]

point taken korkus2000.
This is getting way off Google but I'll ask you since you seem very knowledgable. I have a major altavista problem: Scooter crawls me regularly but I am only in av by url (search for "mysite.com" I'm there. search for ANYTHING else (verbatim title of my homepagem any keyword, you name it) and I never, ever show anywhere. Any ideas?

[Allergic]

Just a little correction.
Google will use the Description Meta and show it in results, if there are no text readable in a page (like a graphic splash page).

[TWhalen]

Not even 3 days ago, I got a result in Google which used my EXACT meta description for a page I maintain.

So to those who would say "Google does NOT use meta tags" at all, I'd hold on that thought for a while.

And yes, the page does have a lot of text content on it. I am at a complete loss as to why the meta description was used.

My advice would be to still include meta tags on every page you optimize. It only takes 2 minutes, and you never know when they're going to come in handy.

Better safe than sorry.

[JayC]

One contradiction though: it is an article of faith on here that your PR is negatively affected by including metatag keywords that do not appear in the text of your page. However if Google does not read the keywords tag, how can this be?

I don't think that's an "article of faith" at all; I certainly wouldn't agree with it. First, it would have no affect on your PR (PageRank), the calculation of which includes no on-page elements at all. PR is simply a measurement of incoming links. But perhaps you didn't really mean PageRank when you said "PR."

Second, the admonishment to use in the keywords meta tag only terms that appear on the page should to taken as advice for those search engines that do use that meta tag for ranking. That is, it's not useful Google advice.

if Google made a decision - presumably based on efficiency - to ignore certain metatags, they would ignore them totally, not store their info

Actually, I would think that they, and other search engines, either ignore keywords meta tags or value them only lightly because they are easy to spam, not for reasons of "efficiency." Since they cache entire pages, they'd certainly have the meta tags available if they were to choose to use them.

TWhalen:

Not even 3 days ago, I got a result in Google which used my EXACT meta description for a page I maintain.

Yep, that does happen. It doesn't necessarily mean, though, that they use that text in the ranking algorithm (or that they don't ;)).

[bobmark]

you're right JayC, it was brain freeze, I meant serp
I agree with you except it is hard to guess at the relation between cached pages and the Google index. If the Google index is maintained as a db, it must have fields, however broadly defined. I could see cached pages being totally separate - literally a conventional cache with "links in" but no "links out" to the db or integrated, depending on how they are set up.

[martin]

Google sometimes shows meta descriptions instead of the ransom note.

[mahlon]

Eek! There are about 1,000 or more SEO's that will go out of business if this is the case!

[webmasterworld.com...]

[xbase234]

I added legit meta keywords and descriptions to a site last week, and immediately dropped 5-6 places in Google from #1 on 2 major terms. These sites had been firmly in place for over 2 years without meta tags until the big drop.

As an experiment, I just might remove the metas and see if it rises back up to #1.