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For the past two years, I've had a standard template of Meta tags which I have dropped into every project. I got this tag list about a year ago by viewing the source of #*$! and just copying/pasting/altering to my needs.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us" />
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="ALL" />
<meta name="Copyright" content="Copyright line here" />
<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no" />
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true" />
<meta name="description" content="Description here" />
<meta name="keywords" content="keywords here" />
<meta name="Rating" content="General" />
<meta name="revisit-after" content="15 Days" />
<meta name="doc-class" content="Completed" />
After reading online about a lot of changes in how important/not-important certain meta tags are now-a-days, I'm now wondering which ones on the above list should stay, which should go, which should be added.
I don't know if this is a good idea or not, but I'd really rather just stay with a stock-list of meta tags that I just drop into each project rather than re-writing this list from scratch for each project.
Any and all insight greatly appreciated!
Neophyte
pageoneresults, would using the content="none" tag result in PR being transferred away from the linking page, even though the linked-to page isn't in the index?
I saw the change within two weeks of the next crawl after I added the tag.
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
Mainly because I always place this (generated automatically by my txt editor) at the top of each document before <html>,
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
I thought that it was enough but now I have doubts reading this thread...?!
Then others, as advised here.
Personally, I use the 'author' tag; everyone will say it has no value, and I'm not arguing. But when people scrape or steal your site, they are usually much too lazy and stupid to remove it, and it has helped me (twice!) to demonstrate my ownership of content.
<meta name="author" content="myname">
<base>[edited by: encyclo at 11:24 pm (utc) on Aug. 5, 2007]
Ahhh! I should have asked that years ago. That explains several things I was confused about.
When using the Robots META Tag, be sure not to include a Disallow line in your robots.txt file. It has to be one or the other, not both.
If you Disallow the /file/ from getting indexed, that means Google won't go to that page and see the Robots META Tag. So, the URI only listing will appear in Google's indice when doing site: searches.
If you remove the Disallow line and drop in the Robots META Tag, that page won't show at all. No URI listing, nothing, nada.
Also keep in mind that your robots.txt file is open to prying eyes. Anything you specify in there is available for all to see. If you've got something that "absolutely should not be indexed", then it should be in a password protected/secure area.
[edited by: encyclo at 11:21 pm (utc) on Aug. 5, 2007]
For meta keywords google and msn don't seem to use it however yahoo does.
I just comfirmed this post from klown with a new site that I just uploaded a week ago. All I had up content-wise was a "coming soon" blurb which did not include the keyword that the Yahoo searcher was after. It was only in the keywords meta tag.
Also, oddly enough, the site is ranking #14 in the Yahoo SERPs, it's only a week old, and I haven't even submitted it. Go figure.....
<meta name="david" content="david" />
what was I thinking?
I meant to have <meta name="author" ...> ofcourse, but I wonder if totally wrong/ fake meta tags hurt me all this time?
I tried switching to UTF 8 at one time. It wasn't a simple change and I had to undo what I did. It didn't like some of the characters being used within the site and created all sorts of havoc. At the time, I didn't have the inclination to go through thousands of pages and figure out what the character issues were.
When you change the character set for your web site it is not sufficient to only change the http header and the meta tag. You must also make sure that your static html files and dynamically generated content are encoded in the same character set. For example, if you are using a Windows server and have your static html files saved in the Windows ANSI format, setting the http header/meta tag to utf-8 will result in strange looking pages in the web browser. This is because you have told the browser that your html pages are in utf-8 when in fact they are encoded in Windows ANSI format.
The solution is to save your html files in the utf-8 encoding. You can do this using e.g. Notepad. If you are generating dynamic content you must set the content type of the http response to utf-8 (before the content is written to the output stream). If you are using a commercial content management system the content type should be possible to set in a configuration file.
In general using utf-8 is a good idea and it will have no negative impact for the internet user. It will simplify handling of content using international characters on both the server side and on the client side. It does not necessarily entail that more bandwidth will be consumed as is explained in this overview of character encodings [gedcom-parse.sourceforge.net].
If you are not sure which encoding your web site uses open the web site in e.g. Internet Explorer, right click and select Encoding. The encoding detected by IE is indicated in the list. IE also allows you to change the encoding in your browser in case you think that there is a mismatch between the http header/meta tag directives and the actual encoding on the page.
Are you sure that it doesn't save stuff as UTF-16LE in that case?
How can I be sure what encoding my actual pages use? Is there a way to check?
In Firefox, press Ctrl+I (Page Info), and look at the "Encoding".
Modified: (undefined)
Server: Apache
Size: (undefined)
I wonder if either of those would be worth defining.
<meta name="robots" content="none" />
<meta name="robots" content="noidex,nofollow" />
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">
<meta name="robots" content="none">
And I see this a lot
<meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache">
Are these the same, and treated the same?
Yes, "none" is shorthand for "noindex, nofollow".
noarhcive
[google.com...]
none
[robotstxt.org...]
What does Pragma mean?
Forces the browser not to cache the page locally.
For example a 3/4 language site with its link page made available to these languages and showing the same content, I want just the Sites main language link page to be indexed for obvious reasons.
This looks more appropriate for what I want to do :
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
Thanks a lot!
[seroundtable.com...]
A question at SE Roundtable:
Q: Is meta keywords tag still relevant?
A: Microsoft - no, Yahoo! - not really, Google - not really, and Ask - not really. All read it but it is has so little bearing. For a really obscure keyword where it only appears in the keyword tag and no where else on the web, Yahoo! and Ask are the only ones that will show a search result based on it.
