The End of Meta Tags?

I've previously wrote on using tags as meta keywords in Wordpress but are meta tags useful at all? Many SEO experts believe that Google no longer takes meta tags into consideration considering its widespread abuse but the point in contention here is if adding meta tags to your site will actually hurt your rankings?

Well, Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy of First Class SEO conducted an experiment on 6 websites to monitor if meta tags will cause harm to the rankings but the answer currently seems to be inconclusive:

Q: “How much of a difference does eliminating the meta tag information truly make?”

A: Overall, there does seem to be a slight difference in the way that these pages without meta tags are indexed. Of the sites in our experiment, we found that many of them actually ranked higher in position of the SERPs than the sites that utilized meta tags. And while our research is still in its infancy, we do have to consider that our sites may have had additional issues that may have made the results look like the sites without meta tags did better, which in actuality it could be purely coincidence. And as hard as I find this to believe, I have to admit that this could indeed be a possibility.

Anyway, it seems that currently only Yahoo and Google does not take meta keywords into consideration of the relevancy scores of a site but MSN is known to use both meta keywords and descriptions. So, I guess the best practice now is too implement them but do not use them to spam the search engines.

Are Meta Tags Extinct? [via SEOchat]

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 25th, 2006 at 12:16 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.