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Avatar Posted By: stymiee 45 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.johnconde.net)
Category: SEO
It's 2008 and yet one of the most common pieces of SEO advice is still, "Use meta tags". Why don't some people just get that Meta tags are dead for SEO?
7 Comments     

Comments

from g1smd 45 days ago #
Votes: 2 | Vote:
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You're kidding. The title and meta description are vital elements. Ignore them at your peril.

There's endless tales of woe for sites that omit the meta description or use the same text for it for every page of the site.

You can safely ignore the meta keywords tag.

from Skitzzo 45 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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The title of the post is quite misleading. Despite saying "Meta Tags are Dead" the author puts this disclaimer at the beginning of the post:
For the purpose of this blog post, when I say “Meta tags” I am referring to the Meta description and keyword tags only.
However, even with that disclaimer, the post is still absolutely wrong. Description tags still play an important role at the very least in determining how many people click through to your site from the SERPs.

It's ironic, in trying to dispell misinformation the author only serves up more misinformation. After seeing a related post entitled Domain Authority Does Not Affect Your Rankings it looks like this is a habit for this blog.

from JohnHGohde 44 days ago # - show/hide this comment
Votes: -1 | Vote:
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Meta tags are NOT dead. Most meta tags are dead. But, the Description meta tag is anything but dead.

The title tag, which technically is not a meta tag, is also extremely important.

Anybody hear of Google Bombing and anchor text? So, the author's original argument was flawed to begin with.

from NickWilsdon 44 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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Well the author finally comes round in the last paragraph and state why META description can be useful. It's your sales pitch to get the user to click through to your site and not one of the other 9 on the page. That alone makes it valuable.

It's also worth noting that Yahoo! uses the META keywords tag, so you can slip mis-spellings in here and avoid having to put them onto the page copy or title (which makes you/your company look unprofessional).

The reason I still rate them though is that they send a unique signal about the page to Google. When you're trying to avoid the supplementary index you need all the unique signals you can get. Putting in a universal META description would not help or leaving the tag out entirely, as Google may end up grabbing the same first few lines for all your pages.

I do agree about the time factor, this isn't an area which should be focused on and it's sad that for some companies this is still their main SEO strategy. This should be a quick task. For example on large sites it's well worth working with a programmer to create a dynamic template for the tag, so you automatically use unique content from each page. 

from Halfdeck 44 days ago #
Votes: 1 | Vote:
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"When you're trying to avoid the supplementary index you need all the unique signals you can get."

Nick, the supplemental index is not about duplicate content.

from g1smd 44 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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It is when PageRank flow comes into the equation...  as amply demonstrated on many sites with  www and non-www Duplicate Content issues.

from Halfdeck 44 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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"It is when PageRank flow comes into the equation"

http://www.seo4fun.com/blog/2007/02/19/why-duplicate-content-causes-supplimental-results.html

Let me rephrase that then, since in the past I also said duplicate content in a way causes supplemental results: duplicate text (e.g. identical META descriptions) and supplemental results aren't known to be related. Dilution of PageRank due to people linking to multiple versions of the same copy can result in supplemental issues.


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