Forum Moderators: open
so in general, are meta tags useful or not?
i know there is a middle ground to this question but I would prefer a yes/no answer
much appreciated
so in general, are meta tags useful or not?
Yes.
The title and description tags in my eyes are important as they are used in SERPs and can change your CTR in the serps, they do play a part in SEO (the title tag).
Other search engines like meta search engines also use these tags so on the whole meta tags are still needed.
so in general, are meta tags useful or not?
No, and there really is no middle ground answer.
First, the "title," properly called the "title element" but often incorrectly called the "title tag," is not a meta tag. The title is extremely important for optimizing. When used properly, it's perhaps your most important onpage optimizing element.
To clarify what the title is, it those characters that sit between the <title></title> tags in the head section of your page. It appears in the serps, and it appears in the top bar of your browser when you have the page loaded.
Building the Perfect Page - Part II - The Basics
Developing an effective <title> element.
[webmasterworld.com...]
Title Tags: A badly written title will sink your site
How to sabotage your web site without even knowing it
[webmasterworld.com...]
The two "meta tags" commonly thought to affect ranking are the meta keywords tag and the meta description. Consense among knowledgeable SEOs is that both are essentially useless when it comes to ranking. Tuning the meta description can help you present a more attractive description to searchers and can help with click-throughs. It's probably wise to continue using the meta keywords tag just in case you encounter a directory or an odd search engine that uses them, but are not going to help you rank on the major search engines.
There have been numerous discussions regarding these on WebmasterWorld, and there's no reason to repeat them. Learn to search site:webmasterworld.com using Google, and you'll find them.
Anything that influences what appears in the SERPs can influence whether or not someone clickes on your SERP listing, and is therefore important to SEO.
And, in addition to the importance of getting better CTR, there is reason to believe that Google may examine CTR (and possibly whether or not people bounce right back and click on somebody else in the same query results) and use that as one variable that influences ranking.
So, after initially being important, then having little importance, the meta description has resurged to the point of being a standard SEO checklist item to examine for every page you care about.
In summary: rj87uk is correct (pay no attention to that big "No" post below him :-).
Not sure what's going on here altogether, but with Google showing the meta description so much lately, I would say have either a unique page-specific meta description (best), or no meta description at all (second best).
I've promoted the importance of the meta description, and often tell clients to think of it like getting to write a short ad for the page.
[edited by: tedster at 2:49 am (utc) on June 8, 2006]
Additional info: We have record of identical META Descriptions across all site subpages being a problem as far back as G's Austin Update. Was an error of sloppiness on our parts, and like you say, fixing it brought a previously healthy site back better than ever.
I can't stress enough the importance of giving each page a well tuned META description.
I can't stress enough the importance of giving each page a well tuned META description.
Think Inverted Pyramid Writing. I've found the best performing META Descriptions are those that mirror closely the first paragraph or two on the page. ;)
Beginning late last fall, I noticed that having the same meta description on every page was a problem with Google indexing.
I've never launched a site with the same meta description on every page, so I can't comment on this situation exactly. On sites I've handled, ranging from twenty or so pages to hundreds of thousands of pages, I'll generally launch with some, but not all, meta descriptions unique. On the larger sites, there will be more pages with generic descriptions, and rankings don't seem to be affected... but this of course is sometimes hard to tell, as comparisons aren't easily done.
Could it be, on the pages you saw dropping out last fall, that the page content might have been too similar in other ways beyond meta description? I'm not trying to minimize these observations... just want to indicate that I haven't seen similar effects. I have definitely seen archived pages on a site go supplemental because the titles were all the same, even though the content on each of these pages was highly unique. Based on the unanimity I see here, I would acknowledge the possibility that the meta description might be looked at similarly, but I feel this effect is likely to be in the presence of some other factors as well, and those are perhaps factors that also need to be identified.
I should mention that Matt Cutts, at 30 to 34 minutes into Part One of his recent "Big Interview" with Mike Grehan... talking very specifically about the importance of unique meta descriptions on a large site... pretty much said that creating unique meta descriptions might be low on his list of priorities. I should also mention that I've had enough discussions with Google and Yahoo engineers to know that we often have a better view of what's actually happening with the algo on a page or site level than they do, so I'm not citing Matt's comments as gospel, but I am noting them.
Think Inverted Pyramid Writing. I've found the best performing META Descriptions are those that mirror closely the first paragraph or two on the page.
I fully agree that the meta description is important for increasing click-throughs, and I generally put a fair amount of effort into "tuning" them. Since many of my pages are optimized for synonyms as well as main title phrases, I sometimes find this tuning actually involves some de-tuning the meta description... so that the first sentence on the page ends up being delivered for one search and the meta description ends up being delivered for another. The principle of the inverted pyramid is still quite applicable, but... in the de-tuning... the vocabulary in the description and in the first sentence end up in fact being different. I'm not finding that this tuning or de-tuning has affected rankings.
It doesn't take that much time to quickly paste the first paragraph of the article in the description field and I lift the keywords from that same paragraph and insert those into the appropriate field. 3 minutes max. And if anyone (search engines) needs it, it's there.
