Meta tags 2006

[Steven1976a]

Just wanted some feed back to see if anyone feels that Meta tags other than the obvious ones (Title,
Description, Keywords) give any weighting at all towards search engine rankings.

Does the classification tag help and does anyone use it?
Ive seen the following url http://www. dhanish. com/ ranking very well for a lot of silver jewelry searches such as wholesale silver jewelry (UK spelling also), retail silver jewelry (uk spelling).

[voasi]

Title tag gives weight to search engine rankings and click-thru's.

Description tag gives some weight and good click-thru value.

Keyword tag doesn't give any real value, but good for meta search engines and site complete-ness.

[Gert Leroy]

i'd suggest to add a language metatag as well, since users often click the language radio button Google provides.

However, if this affects your rankings, i don't know. Probably Google is smart enough to detect a language itself, so maybe there is no need. Once again, i don't know.

<meta name="language" content="pt">
pt=portuguese
nl=dutch
fr=french
...

.com is not the only market...

[bhartzer]

Adding a language tag is always helpful to the search engines.

The search engines could figure out which language your site is using using a variety of factors, including the sites that link to your site--if they're in Spanish then your site might be in Spanish, as well.

Other factors that may be taken into account are where your site is hosted, the domain name's TLD, and the language meta tag--which, by the way, can also be specified in the < html > tag, as well (e.g., < html lang="en" >

There's more information about specifying the language here on the W3.org site.

[SEOforGoogle]

To answer the classification tag question -

While I haven't seen anything that clearly makes the usage of the classification tag jump you to a top spot, I think it would be a 1% factor in helping the search engines classify your site, so it can only help, not hurt.

Just my .02

[Mel]

IMO the classification tag is a total waste of time, and seriously doubt that it is even read by any of the major search engines.

The only way to check is to put something unique in such a tag and see if it even gets indexed.