Meta Tags (excluding title) - are they good for anything anymore?
 

I was just doing a site, and I started thinking about meta tags, and their usefulness.

I've had sites with no meta tags except for the title get good listings, and of course had sites with a full set of meta tags get good listings too.

I know you use the no follow for robots if you don't want a page spidered, and that's usefull, but mostly I was wondering about the keyword, description, author, etc. tags. I was wondering what conclusions you all have come to concerning the usefulness of these?

I do not know if Meta tags really matter to Crawlers anymore.

The crawlers tend to look at the whole page now.

So many folks have abused Meta data to the point that its waisted Byte's.

Not sure.. I stopped using them a while back myself, but I do not claim to be a SEO.

I use meta tags, but I always have. I use meta description tag and always meta title. I don't think that the keywords is as important anymore. So, who knows, to each there own I guess.

I heard that on-site optimizing is more important to the new Yahoo algorithm than it has been given weight by google so maybe the meta tags are of some value.

I have heard that several times too.


I think as long as you have the most important meta tag you are fine...

m e t a name="GooglePray" content="Google, please rate me high by keyword porn"> :)

:1orglaugh

meta tags mean a lot to 1000's of smaller search engines...:2 cents:

You owe me $150 for that tip

Thanks. I guess that is why I still use them but even though I didn't think it makes a difference.:)

altavista still likes meta tags. although their paid submission program also produces nice results...though they don't guarantee anything. It updates your listing every 48 hours which is perfect for "tweaking" your page.

theyve been abused too much to be useful nowadays.

LOL