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Has anyone heard of the 'abstract' meta tag? It is a cut down version of the description meta tag which I recently read about.
If anyone actually uses the tag, has it made any difference to your rankings, or the way that the search engines summarise your site (i.e. this tag being used instead of the description in search engine listings)?
Any help / info would be great.
Many thanks,
Borny.
I have honestly never heard of this, but keep checking in, I am sure someone else will let you know their experiences with it.
Welcome to the forums.
Yes i have heard of it, along with many others.
I was using it, as a summary of the description i provided on each page of a particular site, upto approx. 100 characters, however i dropped it as i did not see any benefits, as it seems like it was pushing down the freq/loc equation of the page, by adding another metatag that was not being read. I picked it up in a book called HTML Magic, a while ago. Now i think it is for academic papers, rather than the search engines, as so many other meta's have no bearing on the SE's, rather they are for human benfit or specialised SE's.
Caine
My understanding is that there are only a few tags that are actually defined in the HTML specs. Search engines chose to recognize the description and keywords tags why back in the early days of the web. This is a convention, not a specification. A modern example is Google choosing to recognize NOARCHIVE in a ROBOTS tag.
You're free to create your own tags but most SEs only recognize the commonly used title, description and keywords tags, and the tags in the HTML specs. The only SEO use I've found for tags beyond these is to adjust a page's keyword density.
