no keywords?

[GooMoo]

anyone know why search engines might not be seeing the keywords or description meta tags of this page?

http://www.caplockstudios.com

[Black Knight]

Almost all of the top-tier search engines pay little or no attention to meta tags. Meta tags ceased to be a major SEO issue about 4 years ago, and the only meta tag that matters at all is the Description, not because it will aid your ranking, but because it may still be used as the snippet for your listing on Inktomi based search engines, and on second-tier (minor) search engines.

That's it.

Meta tags have no more value in SEO than that really.

[sudhani]

Almost all of the top-tier search engines pay little or no attention to meta tags. Meta tags ceased to be a major SEO issue about 4 years ago, and the only meta tag that matters at all is the Description, not because it will aid your ranking, but because it may still be used as the snippet for your listing on Inktomi based search engines, and on second-tier (minor) search engines.

That's it.

Meta tags have no more value in SEO than that really.

But, don't you think meta tags give a starting point for the SE crawler to understand what to look for in that page?

I am not talking about those people who try to spam SE with a number of keywords / phrases. We treat each page as a potential #1 and defintely pitch each page for a different key word / or key phrase. We try to restrict ourselves using just the key phrase in meta tags. Our experience gave us good results.

But i agree with you with the fact that the minimum weight given to these tags. But still havent decided to do a page without them.

[janeth]

Hi sudhani,
Since Google says they look at more then a 100 different things when deciding where to put your page and since they do not say they do not look at meta tags I would not remove them.

They do not hurt and stand a chance of helping you.
Also where there is little or no text incoming links and meta tags is the only way Google has to know what your site is about.

As I said before Google does not say one way or the other but I would not take the chance.

I believe that it does play a roll. Even if it is a small one it may be the very thing you need to move a head of your competition.

[GooMoo]

It's kinda buggin me cause my portfolio site is indexed higher than the actual site, because i mention "Caplock Studios". The page that's listed in my portfolio has a keyword density of .5, where the keyword density of the homepage for caplock is 8.5. and there are no meta tags on my portfolio, i didn't want it indexed in the first place! There is actual text on the page, in a hidden div tag for section 508 browsers that wouldn't otherwise see the text in the iframe (it's exactly the same as the text in the main iframe). the reason i think search engines aren't seeing the meta tags is because they're taking the page description right from the text in the hidden div tag, not the description meta tag like Black Knight suggests (i thought that's what they did too!).

EDIT: and here's the kicker folks, i found that my site had been removed from google this morning after being listed for two weeks or so (though the keywords/description still didnt seem to be there), BUT i also found this morning that my site IS listed in DMOZ, whats up with that! is it even possible to be listed in DMOZ and not in Google, yahoo, etc.?

[janeth]

Black Knight said,
Meta tags ceased to be a major SEO issue about 4 years ago, and the only meta tag that matters at all is the Description,

Then why did you use them on your site? Do you not trust your on advice?

[minstrel]

Black Knight said,
Meta tags ceased to be a major SEO issue about 4 years ago, and the only meta tag that matters at all is the Description,

Then why did you use them on your site? Do you not trust your on advice?

While I don't want to get into your debate with Black Knight, I will say that I tend to agree with what you say, Janeth. We can try to optimize for Google, even though Google for obvious reasons isn't telling anyone the full secrets of their system, but I don't think anyone really knows entirely what Google ignores and does not ignore other than Google itself.

We also need to remember that, while Google may be the biggest game in town, it isn't the only game in town. There are other search engines and some of them purportedly do pay attention to various meta tags. It's also wise to remember that Google may be #1 today but it wasn't so long ago that Yahoo and AltaVista were #1 and #2 - who knows who will be #1 tomorrow?

In the end, my feeling is this: If you show me that using a certain meta tag or other SEO technique may or will result in my being penalized by any one of the search engines, then I'll dump it in an instant. If you tell me that a certain meta tag probably won't help, knowing that neither you nor I know all of the secrets of the trade, my inclination is to leave it in.

Parenthetically, I am curious as to how Janeth finds the time to write all these posts and still make a living... :-)