Comments on: Important HTML Meta Tags

By: Doogie

Doogie — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 18:33:16 +0000

Hi Andy

The W3Schools article doesn’t give any indication that they think the meta tags used in their examples are important. It simply shows you how to use them. Two out of the three examples they give have not been used by any major search engines since the 1990s, which is when the W3Schools article was probably written.

By: Andy Carloff

Andy Carloff — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 20:55:21 +0000

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_meta_name.asp — The W3Schools seems to think those tags are important, actually. Makes sense, too.

By: jack

jack — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 09:07:51 +0000

Wow!

Very useful!
I’ve learnt SEO for days but could now see that the tutor gave me just an half of things. Thanks…

By: Rose

Rose — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 06:58:00 +0000

Thanks for the outline of the meta tags considered important / or not. I have streamlined the meta tags and it all makes perfect sense to me.
There are a few that I would like to query – some are standard such as ‘Distribution’, content-language, ‘document-rating’ – How useful are these now in everyone opinion?
A few meta tage that I had never seen until recent are popping up – ‘classification’ eg and ‘subject’ eg Is this something a webdesigner sat in NZ AA tourism just thought up one day and dont mean a thing or are they a useful addition?

By: TE

TE — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 13:07:08 +0000

Hi Diane

Meta tags are intended to only affect the page on which they are found.

To block single pages, you want to use the following robots meta tag on each page you wish to block from indexing:

This tells the spiders to NOT index the page, but DO follow the links to other pages. I’ve used it for years and have never seen it affect other pages in a site. Only place it on the pages that you do not want to see indexed.

By: diane

diane — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 21:58:43 +0000

I have a 40 plus cat rescue site so it is important that it be indexed for which I have meta tags.

I am adding 5 pages that are not cat related that I do not want to be indexed. If I use the NO INDEX tag on each of those 5 pages, can I be sure it will not affect the rest of my site? Thank you. diane

By: TE

TE — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 22:37:42 +0000

Most meta tag generators continue to generate several virtually worthless meta tags. Many claim that using those meta tags will improve your rank positions. This is utter nonsense and thousands of articles on the web support my position.

The Microsoft Smart Tags meta tag was created to avoid the uproar that occurred when MS first announced the Smart Tags feature, which did intent to inject links into your content that would take users to other sites. That meta tag didn’t stop the outrage from site owners, so Smart Tags were never implemented.

By: Larry Kuck

Larry Kuck — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 07:25:05 +0000

I have seen many articles on this topic with various points of view, and this one dismisses as useless many tags that I currently am using thanks to an online tag generator tool.

However, I was surprised to find the Smart Tags meta tag among the useless. I understand that Internet Explorer 6 and Microsoft Office tools use this Smart Tags feature to insert links onto rendered Web documents if permitted to do so, though one source did say this tag may or may not work to prevent the Microsoft re-edit of my pages.

I have read before that minimizing overhead to bring the content up closer to the top of the page source script makes it more relevant to search engines.

I have seen some of the abuses of the Keywords tag, and or perhaps if it is used, best if those keywords appear in a header text (h1 – h6), since search engines assign more relevance to headers and strong text than the normal text in a page. Along that line, it is a good practice to follow a good outline, and I make use of the W3C HTML Validation Service’s outline tool.