Meta tags - better NOT to have?
-
OK ok . . . the SEOMox report card told me it's actually better NOT to have meta tag keywords on my page, because my competitors can then look at my page to see what words I am trying to target . . .
That makes since, but is also painfully counter intuitive. I thought I would just double check and make sure . .. NO META TAGS KEYWORDS?
and if so . . .. what (if anything) should I have in the meta tags?
-
The only meta that I really care about is the Description. The others i let wordpress auto manage but im thinking in getting it out (the meta keyword) since it would be a hint to my competitors on wich keywords i have been optmizing for.
-
I don't use meta keywords simply because I don't think they have any value at all.
I do use meta descriptions though. At first I didn't because Google usually does a good job at picking out a snippet that is appropriate to the user's search.
However, if you have stuff that gets shared on Facebook, Facebook uses the meta description as a description for the post when it gets shared.
-
I agree. If any competitor is sniffin' your meta tags you probably don't have to worry about him.
-
In 2011, true SEO professionals could care less what you put in your meta Keywords field, since that field has not been used as an SEO method in a long long time. All they need do is look at your page Titles. Or they can run a bot to scrape your page Titles, h1 tags, link URLs, internal and inbound link anchor text, image alt attributes, to generate a neat spreadsheet. All automatically.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate Title Tag
We are getting a Duplicate Title Tag error on our pages but we have different titles and the differences are being seen by Google. We are using the code <%@ Page Title="School Lunch Software Pricing || EZ School Apps"%> Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | EZParentCenter0 -
Title Tag vs. H1 / H2
OK, Title tag, no problem, it's the SEO juice, appears on SERP, etc. Got it. But I'm reading up on H1 and getting conflicting bits of information ... Only use H1 once? H1 is crucial for SERP Use H1s for subheads Google almost never looks past H2 for relevance So say I've got a blog post with three sections ... do I use H1 three times (or does Google think you're playing them ...) Or do I create a "big" H1 subhead and then use H2s? Or just use all H2s because H1s are scary? 🙂 I frequently use subheads, it would seem weird to me to have one a font size bigger than another, but of course I can adjust that in settings ... Thoughts? Lisa
Technical SEO | | ChristianRubio0 -
Easy Question: regarding no index meta tag vs robot.txt
This seems like a dumb question, but I'm not sure what the answer is. I have an ecommerce client who has a couple of subdirectories "gallery" and "blog". Neither directory gets a lot of traffic or really turns into much conversions, so I want to remove the pages so they don't drain my page rank from more important pages. Does this sound like a good idea? I was thinking of either disallowing the folders via robot.txt file or add a "no index" tag or 301redirect or delete them. Can you help me determine which is best. **DEINDEX: **As I understand it, the no index meta tag is going to allow the robots to still crawl the pages, but they won't be indexed. The supposed good news is that it still allows link juice to be passed through. This seems like a bad thing to me because I don't want to waste my link juice passing to these pages. The idea is to keep my page rank from being dilluted on these pages. Kind of similar question, if page rank is finite, does google still treat these pages as part of the site even if it's not indexing them? If I do deindex these pages, I think there are quite a few internal links to these pages. Even those these pages are deindexed, they still exist, so it's not as if the site would return a 404 right? ROBOTS.TXT As I understand it, this will keep the robots from crawling the page, so it won't be indexed and the link juice won't pass. I don't want to waste page rank which links to these pages, so is this a bad option? **301 redirect: **What if I just 301 redirect all these pages back to the homepage? Is this an easy answer? Part of the problem with this solution is that I'm not sure if it's permanent, but even more importantly is that currently 80% of the site is made up of blog and gallery pages and I think it would be strange to have the vast majority of the site 301 redirecting to the home page. What do you think? DELETE PAGES: Maybe I could just delete all the pages. This will keep the pages from taking link juice and will deindex, but I think there's quite a few internal links to these pages. How would you find all the internal links that point to these pages. There's hundreds of them.
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
How similar do pages need to be to utilize the canonical tag
One of my pages is a help and questions page about completing a conversions and the other is the actual campaign landing page. They are both ranking for the same term. While the subject of both pages is similar the content is not. Is the rel canonical tag appropriate here?
Technical SEO | | cbarron0 -
Auto generated meta description tag in Drupal
Was having issues on Drupal not autogenerating a meta description tag, but I think I have figured it out. Just to verify, would this piece of code be the meta description tag (reason I ask is b/c it looks a little different than the usual tag I have seen):
Technical SEO | | kevgrand0 -
Meta Refresh for No Javascript message
We're currently using meta refresh tag to check if JavaScript is enabled or not in users browsers. And if not then we redirect them to jsnotfound.aspx page: <metahttp-equiv="refresh"content="0;url= default.aspx?jse="0"/"></metahttp-equiv="refresh"content="0;url=> It's being flagged in SEOmoz tools so our developer tried solution highlighted in this Question: http://www.seomoz.org/q/meta-refresh-nojavascript-url ...but he couldn't get it to work. Is it really imperative we don't use the meta refresh for this purpose? Thanks in advance. Michael
Technical SEO | | LawrenceNeal0 -
Tripping versus Tripping.com in title tags?
Hi All, We had a quick question regarding the construction of title tags throughout our site (yay for optimizing!). We were wondering what is considered best practice or what we should be considering when we're deciding how to end our title tags - basically, it's between Tripping and Tripping.com. For example: This is the content | Tripping OR This it the content | Tripping.com Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated! Thanks,
Technical SEO | | seospeedwagon
Bianca0 -
Should rel canonical tags include the root domain
It does sound like a silly question but bear with me a little... I recently installed on my Joomla website a module that automatically creates rel canonical tags for pages that contain lists that can be sorted by different criteria: (price, alphabetic order, etc...) I know that a proper canonical tag should look like this: However, the module I'm using creates the following structure Will this work? I mean, will it be "understood" by the bots? To see what the module actually does, you can visit the following link http://www.quipeutlefaire.fr/fr/index.php?sort=price&sort_direction=desc&limit=10&limitstart=0&option=com_auctions&category=240 In the source code you will see that the canonical tag is Which is the original "unsorted" page. Thanks in advance for your help
Technical SEO | | QPLF0