Meta Tags at Webmasterworld

Are Meta Tags no longer being used?

[twilight47]

Are Meta Tags no longer being used on webmasterworld.com?

Did there used to be meta tags or am I hallucinating?

Being fairly new to web design I am interested in the why's of design.
Is there a benefit in not having tags?

Please excuse any ignorance on my part, it's not intentional. :)

[vincevincevince]

let me throw this back at you... what is the BENEFIT in the meta tags?

users never see them

the vast majority of first tier search engines totally ignore them

they add a few bytes to every single page you serve up

they show your competitors exactly which keywords you want to serve up

(even inktomi recommends not using them unless you have the time to write them individually for every single page)

did i miss something folks?

[jeremy goodrich]

Um, how do you know you are getting the same data in your browser that the search engine bots are getting?

:) :) :)

Think about it.

[twilight47]

vincevincevince

You make a great point. But aren't some good for information purposes?

jeremy goodrich

Um, how do you know you are getting the same data in your browser that the search engine bots are getting?

How do I hide my tags? :)

[vincevincevince]

How do I hide my tags? :)

just ban google from caching and only output tags if the useragent is google

try not to get reported as cloaking

[jeremy goodrich]

Check out the Cloaking forum [webmasterworld.com] here at WebmasterWorld.

I am 100% sure, after reading there, you will come away with more answers than questions :)

[ritualcoffee]

Vince,

One very large benefit:
if you have a site search. I know my internal site search is heavily weighted towards meta tags. Meta tags also cover more info then just description and keywords - consider dates, countries, etc. Benefits are determined by what type of site you have.

[heini]

just a small addition, basically offtopic: Strictly speaking it's not true that engines don't use meta tags. Look at the search engine promotion forum, and possibly at the browsers forum, lots of discussions on meta tags, how and which to use.
If you are interested in specific SEs usage of metas, look at the respective forums here. Use site search to find more info.

[rogerd]

Ritualcoffee makes a good point. SEs tend to disregard metas because, being invisible to the surfer, they are easy to abuse. On your own site, of course, you shouldn't have to worry about spammers (I hope!), so using well-designed metas makes a lot of sense for your site search function. Some site search systems even use custom metas so you can further tweak your internal SERPs.

Considering the pressure to conserve bandwidth in a busy forum, not delivering meta tag content to human visitors, might (theoretically ;)) make sense.

[Brett_Tabke]

meta's can average from 200 chars, to 1000 chars. Given the bandwidth we use here, why would a crank out 200 to 1000meg a day in bandwidth just to present users with meta tags they can't use?

just switch your agent to "slurp" to see them...