Child Safe Meta Tags Question

Will it hurt / help / no difference to SE?

[john_patti]

Trying to determine, I use these tages in my site currently. The site does not have anything to offend yet some of my keywords are flagable such as mammography. Will it hurt rankings to have these tags ( which i copied from another site)?

[Mike_Mackin]

Are we talking about

<META http-equiv="PICS-Label" content='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.classify.org/safesurf/" l gen true for "http://www.YOURdomain.com" r (SS~~000 1))'>

I think they help.
Not sure that you should copy from another site. Just sign up.

[rcjordan]

I did the [icra.org...] ratings. My gut call is that they hurt, but it was probably the amount of code required at the top of the page. I'm going to ditch them.

[jdMorgan]

I added the PICS label tag after a visitor complained that he could not access the site from home. Upon investigation, he had IE's safe surfing mode enabled at home (his kids shared the machine) and his office machine had safe-surfing disabled. In the configuration he was using, a page without a tag is blocked.

Each webmaster will have to decide whether the push-down effect of the PICS code at the top of the page is worse than turning away visitors who have the safe-surfing mode enabled.

There are also a couple of directories you can't get listed in without the tag, SafePages and another one, IIRC. Fairly minor directories now, but something to take into consideration.

Jim

[pageoneresults]

My understanding of the best way to do this is through the http headers at the server level. You can read more about PICS here...

PICS - Platform for Internet Content Selection [w3.org]

I haven't delved into this much since 1997 when they first became a standard from the W3C. At that time, it was the in thing to do. Over the years though, things have changed. I need to research more on this, its on my list of things to do.