Are Meta Tags Extinct? - Methodology
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The Methodology
When I was brainstorming as to why the lack of meta tags would affect search engine results, and how drastic the change would be, I thought of a couple of theories as to why this might happen.
I mentioned the first one earlier: abuse of the meta tags in the past has led to complete disregard of them by a search engine spider. We have seen less and less emphasis placed on the meta keyword tags by the search engines, and even though the description tags seem to be listed in the SERPS under a particular URL, we also realize that the description can easily be different than the actual site content itself. Over the past few months, we’ve seen the relevancy of the description meta tag deteriorate very rapidly.
Consider this: search engines are listing more than just HTML files in their SERPs. They are listing Adobe PDF files, XML files, including RSS feeds, and with the help of a Macromedia Software Development Kit (SDK) for search engines (or similar software), a search engine can now read Flash movies and websites. With all of this new technology, it only seems reasonable that a search engine could find relevant pages with these other web languages. One thing you will notice, however, is that none of the web languages I’ve listed utilize meta tag information.
Google’s search engine, in particular, has refined the technique of extracting content from web pages, XML files, PDF files, and even Flash movies. It only makes sense that Google will turn this same method on HTML pages to find a pages’ relevancy score.
The Questions
I touched on a few questions that came to mind during our brainstorm sessions earlier. And certainly we came up with a few very valid and important questions.
- What does a search engine use to replace meta tag information if it is not present?
- How does a search engine that uses meta tags treat web pages that don’t have meta tag information?
- How much of a difference does eliminating the meta tag information truly make?
- Do Google and Yahoo still take meta tag information into account in order to penalize for spamming?
- Which search engines still use meta tag information, and which do not?
Next: Results of the Experiment >>
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