Meta tags knocking a PR

[seaford77]

Excuse me if this is a little simple, i am quite new to the 'webmaster world'

i just wondered would Google ever knock your rating down or give you a penalty for using too many key words in your HTML tags or putting too many words in your title tag?

or is it that Google will only read so many anyway so it does not matter how many you put in?

I would really appreciate some help on this!

thanks

[Robin_reala]

From my reading around, you'll get penalised if you try and spam with meta keywords (and this includes putting lots in), but then it'll only be a little bit. But then again Google basically ignores meta keywords anyway.

[seaford77]

i have 40 - 45 keywords words and 40 - 45 title words in my tags, not a massive amount?

They are also relevant to the page, do you think this is excessive or OK? i take it by spam you mean words like sex etc?

[Wizard]

No more than 65 characters in title tag, no more than 150 characters in meta description, no more than 5 keywords in meta keywords, all must be present in page text content. That's what I'd say if you asked for 'rule of the thumb'.

Spamming is not using words like sex, it's as good and respectible keyword as every other. Meta spamming is putting many keywords in meta keywords, more than several, and reapeating them more than twice, and putting them artificially into meta title and meta description, making it long and illogical.

High ranking won't help you if your snippet look poor, and your snippet is based on meta title and description.

[tedster]

your snippet is based on meta title and description

And possibly a DMOZ description, and possibly content extracted from the page.

-----

I'd like to play professor a bit in the interest of using terms in a more exact way:

PR: one specific measure of linking patterns that Google makes to use as part of its algorithm. PR is not the same as what your page's overal ranking is.

Title: it's not truly a meta element, it is an element all on its (the title element)

[Wizard]

And possibly a DMOZ description, and possibly content extracted from the page

Exactly, and which one we're going to see in the snippet actually depends on search phrase. In site: search the most likely is DMOZ description, if available, but it chages from time to time, and there's no clear rule when it's meta description and when a content - I have seen different results for very similiar pages in one of my sites in site: search. But in keyword search the most likely snippet is the one that matches to searching terms.

[Pico_Train]

since when was it 65 characters in the title element? 80 is probably about right.

[tedster]

For about a year, Google's been truncating the displayed title element after 64 characters. They still take up to 100 characters or so into consideration in the algo, but because the last 35 won't be displayed, they don't get weighted nearly as highly.

[Pico_Train]

cool, thanks, will keep that in mind then!

[texasville]

Hmmmph...one of m y competitors who has the #1 spot with a smarmy site has about 450 characters in the title and about 600 characters in the keywords and about 350 in the description.

It has a bunch of blackhat stuff and was removed from the index by GoogleGuy himself about three months ago.
It's back and #1 again with no changes on it's blackhat. None.

I can't believe there is any harm in using what ever number you choose in the meta's.

[seaford77]

nice one, i will take the majority the meta tags out then and leave in the relevant ones.

[annej]

I can't believe there is any harm in using what ever number you choose in the meta's.

But there are advantages to doing them right. The description is often used for the description in the serps. Why not make your page look interesting rather than spammy?

[texasville]

>>>The description is often used for the description in the serps. Why not make your page look interesting rather than spammy?<<<

Oh, I agree. As for myself, I use the best topic sentence from each page as it's description in a deliberate attempt to give something real to read to the surfer and lure that person to the page to read more.
I feel it gives the surfer an excellent idea what my page is about or NOT about. After all, if I don't have what they want, why have them chewing my bandwidth?