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Looking at sites in GB2312 and Big5 there seems to be different systems in use for dividing the keywords in the meta tag. Can anyone advise me of the best way to do this?
- no spaces between any characters?
- spaces between words? (One character or more)
- commas between words?
- a vertical bar between words?
I don't know what this bar is called but I've seen it used in both the keyword and the description meta tags.
Thanks in advance,
Harry
The only method you mentioned I have not seen used is the "vertical bar". Would that be the ASCII pipe ¦ character? Is that a special Chinese character?
I am not sure if the character I have seen is the ASCII pipe ¦ character, but it probably is because the pipe character displays as an unbroken line in a GB2312 encoded page. (I have just checked!)
I assumed it was a special GB character because it's available as a symbol on my NJStar WP. In the WP the pipe displays as a single byte character, whereas the symbol is double byte. The symbol is also available in normal width or a thicker width that looks like bold face.
I have seen it used in titles and descriptions to seperate phrases, so I was wondering if some sort of new local standard was emerging.
Has anybody else used or advocated this pipe/vertical line for separating Chinese keywords in their meta tags?
It's possible that what I thought were vertical bars in the meta description was due to the absence of this meta tag and the Google search results snippets showing navigation links.
But I'm sure I saw this in at least one keywords meta tag, but as I say can't find it now.
I'll just stick to commas or spaces. :)
OK, I really don't know, but I'm treating UNICODE-entity-code-encoded Chinese and Japanese like any other language (and am mixing languages in my keywords tag!) with word groups separated by "," (comma) and words separated by " " (space), though of course there may not be a good way of deciding exactly which group of zh/ja characters is to be treated as the equivalent of an English/French/whatever word.
But maybe I'm missing the point entirely.
I can paste an example here if woz/bill permit.
Rgds
Damon
word groups separated by "," (comma) and words separated by " " (space)
...of course there may not be a good way of deciding exactly which group of zh/ja characters is to be treated as the equivalent of an English/French/whatever word.
I'm not an advocate of multilingual pages except in special circumstances. You get better performance and audience response from a single language page. Since we're talking about the keywords meta tag here, and one of the few reasons to use this tag is for improved SE indexing, I don't see multilingual tags being much help.
I can paste an example here if woz/bill permit.
OK, here is one example. The keywords are intended to be synonyms to help non-English searchers:
<meta name=keywords content="woman,striding,...,female, adult, banu, femme, frau, 女, 女子, women, femmes">
Does that help?
Of course (1) I am guessing that this is a reasonable thing to do (2) I cannot prove that this works, though I do get organic search traffic from non-English surfers including though baidu for example, so far as I can tell.
Rgds
Damon
Sorry, trying to answer before my first tea/coffee of the morning made that as clear as mud... %-P
1) Note that I assume that SEs don't care about extraneous spaces *around* the commas and keyword groups, eg I assume that "two,words" and "two, words" and " two , words " are equivalent, but different to "two words".
2) The ... doesn't appear literally in my keywords: I just snipped out a bunch of stuff not relevant here.
3) Even in English it's not always clear where the word boundaries should be, so I have another page with a meta keyword set that looks something like "breastfeeding, breast feeding, nursing, suckling" in case the SEs don't treat breastfeeding and breast feeding as synonyms. (German and Welsh love compound nouns too!) And no, I don't have the Chinese for "breatfeeding"...
Rgds
Damon
I would suggest that putting a word from one language in the keyword tag on a page written in another language is spammy when there is no content in that language. Although I must admit I used to do this once upon a time.
I would argue that using multi-language keyword meta tags might be pushing those boundaries if you don't have the languages represented on the page. If you don't have content in the particular language then who benefits? If I'm searching for a Chinese keyword and I end up on a Hungarian site that ranked due to clever keyword tag manipulation I wouldn't be too happy.
[I think this is a bit OT, but your concern is reasonable...]
The reason that I think that I'm *not* SPAMming is that the content is primarily multimedia, ie not language specific, and I only include synonyms for what I think are likely to be popular "cross-cultural" topics and where I have at least some localisation for the language in question. This is a not-for-profit site too...
I do have some Chinese localisation for the site, and thus I think that the Chinese synonyms are legit.
And, BTW, any terms that turn up in my keywords are also inserted into the page body from the same database, though that would be a thin technical defence at best.
BTW2, I have just switched about half my pages to NOINDEX in an experiment to *reduce* any accidental SPAMming of the SEs by me!
Rgds
Damon
A common use for META is to specify keywords that a search engine may use to improve the quality of search results. When several META elements provide language-dependent information about a document, search engines may filter on the lang attribute to display search results using the language preferences of the user. For example,<-- For speakers of US English -->
<META name="keywords" lang="en-us"
content="vacation, Greece, sunshine">
<-- For speakers of British English -->
<META name="keywords" lang="en"
content="holiday, Greece, sunshine">
<-- For speakers of French -->
<META name="keywords" lang="fr"
content="vacances, Grèce, soleil">
I really doubt that SEs take any notice of a keywords lang attribute (yet).
In any case, the SEs can and do request my pages in other locales with the lang tags set correctly and the words in the page, so one way or another I don't think that what I am doing is harmful.
But one word from Mr Cutts and I shall scurry off to change things! B^<
Rgds
Damon
