Closing the debate on the use of meta tags, Bing no longer use meta description as a positive ranking factor in their algorithm. Whether your market is in Europe (where they have on average 6% market share) or America (where the average market share is 11%) the message sent by Google and Bing is clear : make sure meta description tags are optimised for clicks and forget about stuffing it with keywords.
7 Comments
7 Comments
Comments
The title of this post is misleading. The destination page offers no proof that Bing is not using metadata in their algo.
Guess that makes it a best practice type of thing with little value. Optimize for the user instead. I'm still going to sneak a keyword in though.
totally NOT spot-on...ie the headline is simply not true.... :-((( Jim
@pageoneresult and @JVRudnick - the article gave the unique code I put in the meta description for the "test page" and this page is not showing in the result page when I search for that code. What else could it be?
Hmmm, not sure. Did you try putting that unique code in the META Keywords element too? I think if you had it there in addition to the META Description, things may have worked out differently? ;)
I used a different unique code for the meta keywords (gfds456gfds78g9fsteqwc4), which is not returning the test page either. Do you mean I should have had the same code for both meta keywords and description?
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Off to test this.
Absolutely! You could have also used the Abstract, Classification, Distribution, Subject and Title Metadata. Oh, don't forget about HTML Comments too. ;)