Which Spiders Use Meta Tags?

[WebDude911]

Which Spiders Use Meta Tags? I have heard most of them (including Google) ignore Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions. Anyone know of a list of spiders which will look at/give some credit to the above Meta Tags?

Thanks!
-WebDude

[S e a r c hBliss]

It's hard to say, but first of all, Google does not ignore the description meta tag. The will display pieces of it depending on the search term from titme to time in the SERP's, so they musn't ignore it. I would use the description and keywords meta tags and if a spider ignores it, there is no loss. Just make sure that you utilize the body content, text, alt tags, anchor text in links, etc., and all will be fine.

[edited by: rogerd at 8:38 pm (utc) on Aug. 25, 2005]
[edit reason] No sigs or URLs, please... [/edit]

[JayC]

>> The will display pieces of it depending on the search term from titme to time in the SERP's, so they musn't ignore it.

But keep in mind that the fact that they'll display the contents of that tag under some circumstances doesn't necessarily mean that it's used in determining rankings.

I'd also point out for the sake of using an accurate lexicon that the only meta tag that's relevant to "spiders" is the robots meta (and similar proprietary tags like Google's "googlebot" meta tag). Google is a search engine, not a spider. :)

[davidwarmuz]

I know for sure Yahoo uses both Meta Description and Meta Keyword tags.

Cheers
David

[smeyler]

Yahoo definitely does. Our site comes up for a term we purposely only included in the Meta description. It is nowhere else on the site.

Google uses it (snippets of meta description) in the description if the keyword query matches a word in the description. This is important as getting ranked high is one thing, getting the click is also important.