Forum Moderators: phranque
Can, it be reasonably assumed that a site nowadays, certainly regarding the top crawlers and re-indexers; i.e. Google, Fast, Teoma, Ink, AV, can do as well as meta tag sites. Concentrating on site structure, themed keyword distribution, quality linking strategy, small kb pages.
I am extremely tempted, and if i was to go this way, i know compitition would be stuffed as their understanding of search engine algo's, are that meta's are king, but if the site did'nt have any, i think they would just be scratching their heads for a while and get bored.
what do you think, or is anyone got reasons too or not too add meta's?
Uhhh, I've dumped all metas.
if there is no meta description, which some SE's use, probably as a default bandwidth, crawl saving excercise > will the SE's that do this, such as ink, goto the content and hunt the keyword occurances ?
That said, I picked an interior directory page (not particularly well-optimized) with no metas that has been up 2 years and checked the serps. It's #11 out of 36,000 on MSN and #7 out of 53k on google. #5 in Teoma. It's not in the top 40 on Fast or Wisenut.
but ink and teoma concern me.
the site will be optimized to an extent, as a rebuild on an old site, though will not be optomized too one kw/term per page, as i have more research to do and have that planned for a new site, with whistles and bells. Hence the site in question fairs well in the search engines, but the structural design is a year old, and some bigger players are stepping into the scenes, hence i want to take that site structurally, and on a keyword basis into a world of its own, compared too competitors that exist. Not by any means trying to get perfection on this build.
<added> bollox to it, will give it a try, if it all goes well, will drop a line in, as the redo, will be on new pages and the old site / bar a couple of pages, will be mostly orphans which i will leave in place for the less regular crawlers.
RC. that old thread you pulled, i noticed a couple of members accounts, had expired, one i was suprised about, he was a mod (met him at pubcon).
Teoma... I can't see any pattern.
Me too, caine. A site with no meta tags at all, as an experiment. February this year, didn't pay a penny for either. Currently:
Teoma:
# 2 out of 109,980
Using first H2 heading (I don't use H1) and the first short paragraph for the description.
Intomi/MSN
60 directory sites, this one is buried so deep it can't be found
Intomi / AOL:
#20 out of 213,498
Also using H2 and first paragraph, same as Teoma.
It's #1 at Google out of 434,000 but at AOL is trailing way, way behind the ones it's ahead of at Google.
With a couple I just checked it seems Teoma is using what's at the very beginning of the page even if there are meta tags. But I don't think I'm quite ready to eliminate meta tags with Inktomi unless it's not an issue, which sometimes it isn't.
Just to see, I'll put in meta tags on that site this week to see if there'll be an Ink/AOL update before the switchover to Google, just to see if it makes a difference.
if it comes down to it, i probably would not submit every page to INK. Just the sectional heads that splits the sub-dir organising the theme's, just to get prospects, onto the site. Hence if the meta desc is necessary, i can load them up.
i tend to build sites and make them live with only the title, then go through adding meta tags and other bits as and when i get time. sometimes the meta tags are added months after the rest of the site is complete. meta tags may be ignored by google etc, but they certainly won't do any harm.
Richard Lowe
