There are a lot of sites out there offering SEO services and software that major on the wonderful things they can do with META tags.
But that’s out of date. Search engines ignore them these days.
So, I asked myself, what are META tags now for, if anything?
Here’s a great piece from WebMonkey in July that answers that very question:
“…today Google and other search engines essentially ignore META keyword tags.
End of story? That’d be sad, indeed, because META keyword tags were a rather sweet idea, at least on paper: short, sensible descriptions of your site, tailored so that machines could quickly read and index it, and subsequently help people find it.
Well, META’s not dead.
In the pages that follow, I’ll be giving you a bird’s eye view of a few independent technologies, each aspiring to get useful metadata back into the Web.”
So, we can forget about META data for SEO, but we can have fun with a lot of other stuff. However, for most sites, it does seem like having no more than fun at the current state of play.
Worth a read, though.
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