META "Keywords" & "Description"

Are they still important

[boomer770]

How important are the Meta "Keywords" and "Description" to Inktomi? I noticed that our website's Meta keywords and description are the same on every page. Our SERPs are not doing well on Yahoo, but very well with Google. Would this affect our SERPs that much?

[DroffatsX3]

How important are the Meta "Keywords" and "Description" to Inktomi?

If you mean to Yahoo, see this: [help.yahoo.com...]

[Tim]

Yahoo Search uses the Metakeywords tag . We did not use them at FAST or Altavista. It is important that you make the keywords and description different (targeted) on every page. Exactly what the page is about. ie. the right specificity. Having all the pages have the same keywords and description is not helpful to the SE.

[internetheaven]

It's nice to see a search engine taking the metakeywords tag back on. Other search engines seemed to disregard the keyword tag rather than take time to create anti-spam triggers. This puts the focus on the webmaster to justify what he has placed in his keywords tag rather than the search engine having to work out what the keywords might be.

[nancyb]

In the past it was said that (for Inktomi) the metakeywords (or keyword phrase) should be separated only by a comma, with no space after the commas. Is this applicable to Yahoo Search also?

[boomer770]

Thanks all. I will start making changes on Monday.

[internetheaven]

nancyb, I've been pondering that one recently too. It became all the fashion some months ago for webmasters to include all their keywords in the meta keywords tag without any commas. The hope was that Search Engines woule then mix and match between the words to create phrases for itself and rank the site highly for 3-4 keyword phrases that could be made out of the keyword 'sentence'. I still see alot of that on the web today but surely it can't work?

[nancyb]

internetheaven,
I also doubt that the reason for no commas was so the se would pick and choose keywords from the tag. I thought the reason was because their algorithm worked better without the comma.

In any case, if you use the metakeyword tag, I would make sure the keywords are actually on the page, not a long string of words found anywhere on the site.

[Allergic]

Cool. I was telling my friends and partners to take care of them and putting the keywords that were appearing in the page.

Really good news, after Gigablast, it is another little step for the Semantic Web.

[Winooski]

I thought the reason was because their algorithm worked better without the comma.

I believe the thought behind omitting commas in the META Keywords tag is to maximize the keyword combinations that the list could match.

For example, if the tag reads:

<META Name="Keywords" Content="blue widgets, red widgets, green widgets">

Then the tag would be slightly less relevant for searches for the phrases "widgets red" and "widgets green", because those phrases were interrupted by commas in the META Keyword tag. If you were to omit the commas, however, the tag and the page would be considered slightly more relevant for those keyword phrases.

That's the rationale, at any case.