Why doesn't the Wikipedia homepage have meta tags?
-
Why doesn't the Wikipedia homepage have meta tags?
-
To add on to Gaston's Reply,
Wikipedia is up that Top 10 or 20 sites that could do everything wrong ( in fact some do ) regarding SEO and still rank number 1, Google's reasoning for this is basically, their too big to fail. If people started not seeing wikipedia pages, heads and traffic would roll.
So since Google knows that traffic will continue as long as certain sites are always listed, they will overlook their SEO issues.
I don't know for how long though, as I see pages from wiki that are awaiting deletion ranking on page 1 and 2 sometimes, not to mention the sometimes completely inaccurate information on some of wiki's pages, although rare doesn't boast well for SERPs relevancy.
So to put it in otherwords, Wikipedia is above the law...
-
I sincerely doubt it's a strategic choice not to have one, though.
-
Well, less a reason than an explanation. To be honest, I have no idea why they didn't use meta description when first establishing the site. It stands to reason, though, that by this point they don't have much incentive to add it.
-
Wikipedia is one of those sites that doesnt have much of SEO optimization.
Another example is the underscore in their URLs.. -
Thank you Matt. I meant to write meta description, completely my fault.
So you're saying Wikipedia's main reasoning, if you had to guess, for them not having a meta desc. would be just because they don't need it?
-
I'm actually seeing some in their source, notably meta charset and <title>. You're right that there's no meta description, for example, which is interesting, but they don't exactly need it. ;)</p></title>
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
-
Why isn't my uneven link flow among index pages causing uneven search traffic?
I'm working with a site that has millions of pages. The link flow through index pages is atrocious, such that for the letter A (for example) the index page A/1.html has a page authority of 25 and the next pages drop until A/70.html (the last index page listing pages that start with A) has a page authority of just 1. However, the pages linked to from the low page authority index pages (that is, the pages whose second letter is at the end of the alphabet) get just as much traffic as the pages linked to from A/1.html (the pages whose second letter is A or B). The site gets a lot of traffic and has a lot of pages, so this is not just a statistical biip. The evidence is overwhelming that the pages from the low authority index pages are getting just as much traffic as those getting traffic from the high authority index pages. Why is this? Should I "fix" the bad link flow problem if traffic patterns indicate there's no problem? Is this hurting me in some other way? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GilReich0 -
Should we use the rel-canonical tag?
We have a secure version of our site, as we often gather sensitive business information from our clients. Our https pages have been indexed as well as our http version. Could it still be a problem to have an http and an https version of our site indexed by Google? Is this seen as being a duplicate site? If so can this be resolved with a rel=canonical tag pointing to the http version? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | annieplaskett1 -
Do my redirects on my homepage need to be 301?
Our domain name is something like www.I-am-cool.com but most people just type in iamcool.com After doing some research I found that those are 302 redirects and I think they should be 301. If I am correct do I need to redirect www.iamcool.com and iamcool.com or just one or the other?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
How can I tell if a website is a 'NoFollow'?
I've been link building for a long time but have recently discovered that most of my links are from NoFollow links, such as twitter and Youtube. How can I tell if a website is a 'NoFollow'?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul_Tovey0 -
'Select your country' page leading to high Temporary Redirects
Hello all, I manage an ecommerce website and product prices are shown depending on what country you select. When a user does a product search or lands on a product page, they are immediately redirected to a 'select your country' page. After selecting their option, the user is redirected back to the product or search result page. The problem I face is that, this is leading to a high 'Temporary Redirects' list in my crawl diagnostic page. Looking at the list of temporary redirects, 90% are users being bounced to a 'select your country' page. Any advice to tackle this? Have you guys faced anything similar? Thanks Cyto
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Googlebot Can't Access My Sites After I Repair My Robots File
Hello Mozzers, A colleague and I have been collectively managing about 12 brands for the past several months and we have recently received a number of messages in the sites' webmaster tools instructing us that 'Googlebot was not able to access our site due to some errors with our robots.txt file' My colleague and I, in turn, created new robots.txt files with the intention of preventing the spider from crawling our 'cgi-bin' directory as follows: User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ After creating the robots and manually re-submitting it in Webmaster Tools (and receiving the green checkbox), I received the same message about Googlebot not being able to access the site, only difference being that this time it was for a different site that I manage. I repeated the process and everything, aesthetically looked correct, however, I continued receiving these messages for each of the other sites I manage on a daily-basis for roughly a 10-day period. Do any of you know why I may be receiving this error? is it not possible for me to block the Googlebot from crawling the 'cgi-bin'? Any and all advice/insight is very much welcome, I hope I'm being descriptive enough!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NiallSmith1 -
Canonical Tag - Question
Hey, I will give a thumbs up and best answer to whoever answers my question correctly. The Canonical Tag is supposed to solve Duplication which is fine. My questions are: Does the Canonical Tag make the PR / Link Juice flow differently? If I have john.long.com/home and john.long.com but put a Canonical Tag on john.long.com/home reading john.long.com then what does this do? Does it flow the Link Equity back to john.long.com? Can you use the Canonical Tag to change PR flow in any means? If I had john.long.com/washing-machines and john.long.com/kids-toys... If I put a Canonical Tag on john.long.com/kids-toys reading john.long.com/washing-machines then would the PR from /kids-toys flow to /washing-machines or would Google just ignore this? (The pages are completely different in this example and content is completely different). Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdiRste0 -
Should I completly remove the meta tags keywords in the html page?
So if the metag is not longer used by the search engines should I keep them in my html ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lomastravel0