Forum Moderators: open
Just had an interesting discovery on a new site that got launched today.
in the meta description & keyword tags, they were closed like this: " />
now i didn't think it would really do anything harmful, but those tags didn't come up in spider sim tests so i was just wondering what the possibility was that SE's wouldn't recognize it either. Just curious if this is going to be a problem, and if anyone's see any difficulty with it before. (i'm banking on the fact that it's maybe just an outdated simulator - but it's bretts, so I'd think not;)
Now, my developer for this site said this about it:
In order to be compliant with XHTML standards (which all websites will be going to within the next year), all tags that do not have a closing tag (for example: <strong></strong> ), must have an ending slash in the tag (for example: <br /> ).
Since META tags do not have the closing tag, they must have this ending slash. If we didn't include it, the site would not validate through W3C.
Most SE's don't pay any heed to meta description or keywords anyway. Don't worry about it...
Nick
But as far as "Most SE's don't pay any heed to meta description or keywords anyway" - as much as that idea has been tossed around and understood to be the truth (usually in terms of google) - I don't necessarily buy it all the time. Inktomi pays real close attention to them, and I've caught several significant instances in Google where a target keyword ONLY appears in the meta info, rather than the body, and they pulled up the meta description as well.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
Teoma used that as part of the description. Not sure if they fixed that or not because that page is now HTML 4.01 If I would have just removed that line of code, I probably would not had a problem.
