Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
We'd like to remove all our meta tags.
Why?
Why?
No really, why would you remove meta tags. They are there 100% for your benefit. There's no drawbacks I can think of to using them, and plenty of drawbacks to not using them.
Does a site have to have meta tags to be effective? We'd like to remove all our meta tags and we are wondering if this is allowed or o.k.
No, tags aren't needed by Google. (Yahoo may value them.) I removed all my Keywords and most Descriptions. I also removed all Alt Tags in seconds. (Thanks, Dreamweaver programmers.)
Months later I see no worse results. (In fact, it may have helped remove a 950 penalty.)
Google says it doesn't value Descriptions much and Keywords even less for ranking.
Good Descriptions, however, can increase Click-Through Rate (it's ad copy, after all). And some webmasters feel Google helps ranking for sites with good CTR.
If the only reason you want to remove tags is to save bandwidth, you may be better off finding a discount host.
Stripping a site of all tags at the same time isn't natural and Google's algo may then take away trust rank points (whose value you don't notice immediately).
In any case, if you go for it, make a back up of the entire site in the event you need to reset it.
p/g
a) if the meta description you had was all unique and the copy was good then you're wrong removing your metas (unless you have over optimized your site).
b) if the meta description you had was all unique but you don't know if it did any good, it maybe worth testing.
c) if every page had the same meta description and you can't (really can't) fix it, then you're right doing it. It's better to not have any meta than having duplicates.
To summarize: unique and with good copy metas (those who make people click) are good; bad metas but unique... you can do better; always the same meta, you're wrong: fix or remove all of them.
You could also have no metas (which doesn't seem to be the case). On that case, sure case a) can improve your CTR.
We'd like to remove all our meta tags and we are wondering if this is allowed or o.k.
You can remove them and there are many around this neck of the woods who have. But, there are those of us who highly recommend that you utilize all of the elements you have available to you.
If your website is structured in a way where the content right after the opening <body> element is suitable for a snippet, then you may be fine. But, if there are a few hundred lines of code with nothing but static navigational elements, you may see less than optimal snippet generation.
In fact, when performing site:example.com searches, you'll see some pretty ugly stuff being snippetized. Stuff like Home ¦ About ¦ Products ¦ Services ¦ Contact ¦ etc. You may find breadcrumbs showing as snippets. Whatever resides right after that opening <body> element is a prime candidate for a snippet if it contains the keyword phrase. You really don't want to leave this up to Google to figure out. ;)
It really comes down to how much junk you have in your trunk. Google will gladly index the junk if that is all you have for them during that first meeting. First impressions are lasting impressions. Using metadata allows you to at least have some control over what is being displayed as a snippet. And, as others have pointed out, it is all about that CTR. A well crafted snippet will pull a lot of "visual" weight in the SERPs.
A good meta description can make for a far more readable and sensible snippet in the serps, and a unique one tells the SEs - and searchers - that you are trying to avoid duplicate content issues.
There are plenty of advanatges in SEO, usability and plain old fashioned compliance with standards.
Think first; make an informed choice over that bandwidth!
I noticed this on my site a few days ago, added the meta charset tag and all is OK now.
Clearly the description tag is what appears in the serps so you want control of that surely. The title tag also appears in the serps so you want control of that as well.
The title tag also appears in the serps so you want control of that as well.
For clarity, the title tag is not a meta tag. I wouldn't dream of removing a title, although I have no philosophical objection to removing metas. Meta keywords probably do more harm than good (IMHO, YMMV). Meta descriptions, as has been noted, are essential for optimising CTR. Regardless of whether CTR is a ranking factor, it blatantly affects trafic. And for me, Trafic is what all this SEO lark is for.
The meta description is very useful. The text from it is displayed as the snippet in SERPs.
Nothing else (except for the title tag, and links to stylesheet and javascript files) is required.
The meta charset tag is required for the page to be a valid HTML 4.01 document.
Sorry to disagree g1msd, but the meta charset is not required in HTML 4.01. The charset is required, but you can specify it (and it's much better) with the headers.
The meta charset can replace a missing header, but it's not mandatory.
However, you are right. I over-simplified it.
The document must have a charset declaration somewhere within -- either in the HTTP header, or as a tag in the HTML head, is fine. It must be in one or the other.
I always remember getting a FAIL from the W3C validator if the charset tag wasn't present.
Ya, that is still the case. I believe that charset element needs to be in the document itself for validation purposes. Serving it in the Server Headers doesn't work for validation, I've tried it before. Maybe I missed something? That was years ago too. I just include it on the page for safe measures just in case that page is saved locally which happens all the time. ;)
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">
<title></title>
<meta name="description" content="">
<meta name="keywords" content="">
<meta name="author" content="">
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/images/favicon.ico" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon">
<link rel="icon" href="/images/favicon.gif" type="image/gif">
</head>What's the inside of your <head> look like?
Author is often omitted, but sometimes date is there instead.
Additional items (last) link to CSS and JS files.
If the OP is messing with some pre-made web software that would make all meta description tags the same, and if it is not easy to alter those meta descriptions so they make some useful reference to the page, then it's not a case of "can", but more "must".
My 3 cents.
also, i typically use fully qualified urls.
cached or locally stored pages can still show the icons, for instance:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.example.com/images/favicon.ico" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon">
also think about external css and javascript in this case.
