Are Meta Tags Extinct?
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A few weeks ago, someone brought an interesting concept to my attention. They claimed that by not using keyword and description meta tags at all in their web pages, they were actually able to get better rankings in Google and Yahoo than before when they used the meta tags.
I had never thought about this before, but I definitely started thinking about it since then. Logically, it would make perfect sense that the search engines might completely disregard the meta tag information, and determine a page’s relevancy score based solely upon that page’s content. After all, with all the abuse that the meta tags have sustained over the years, the best way to eliminate the spam issue is to ignore them completely. But I think the concept is far more complicated than that. What about those sites that intentionally misuse their meta tags to spam the search engines? Do Google and Yahoo take that into account when determining relevancy score? If so, then that means the search engines are not entirely disregarding the meta tags, because they certainly apply penalties for misuse of meta tags. Or do they? Further, if a web page is missing its meta tags, how will the search engines that still read them, like MSN, treat those pages?
I could sit around all day and speculate, but the proof is in the pudding, so to speak. So our firm decided to perform an experiment. We chose six websites to use as our test group, and six others as our control group. In the control group, we used naturally optimized sites that included meta tags. In the test group, we utilized the same optimization techniques on the sites, with the exception of the meta tags, which we left out of the page completely.
We knew we were going to have to wait for a Google update, so we wanted to watch these sites for at least six to eight weeks. We analyzed statistics, keywords, page content and everything else that a good SEO firm should monitor when they are assessing the performance of websites. We treated the test group no differently than we treated the control group. Our only variable among these two groups of sites was the absence of meta keyword tags and meta description tags in the test group.
Next: Methodology >>
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