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
-
X-robots tag causing no index issues
I have an interesting problem with a site which has an x-robot tag blocking the site from being indexed, the site is in Wordpress, there are no issues with the robots.txt or at the page level, I cant find the noindex anywhere. I removed the SEO plug-in which was there and installed Yoast but it made no difference. this is the url: https://www.cotswoldflatroofing.com/ Its coming up with a HTTP error: x-robots tag noindex, nofollow, noarchive
Technical SEO | | Donsimong0 -
Are correcting missing meta descrption tags a good use of time?
My modest website (shew-design.com) has pulled up nearly sixty crawl errors. Almost all of them are missing meta description tags. One friend who knows SEO better than me says that adding meta tags to EVERY page is not a good use of time. My site is available at shew-design.com I'm just getting started in being serious about applying SEO to our site and I want to make sure I'm making the best use of my time. The other error I'm getting are duplicate page names within different directories (e.g. getting started (for branding), getting started (for web). Is this a huge priority? Would welcome your feedback.
Technical SEO | | Eric_Shew0 -
Meta Keywords - Should I define them myself
Hi All, Im sure this has been answered somewhere but I couldn't find it. SEOQuake etc suggest you should define meta keywords. However I was under the impression that this was not best practice Can anyone confirm what I should do/ is best practice? Cheers Bowey
Technical SEO | | CFCU0 -
Who uses WordPress Tags anymore?
Just curious if people are still using WordPress Tags. I wonder if with the direction Google is going the last couple years, having sites that get bloated with extraneous Tag archives just decreases the quality of the site.
Technical SEO | | WilliamBay2 -
Very strange: META descriptions not showing
Hello, Since Panda 4.0 has been launched, all of my optimized META description have been gone in Google.
Technical SEO | | MarcelMoz
A while ago, I posted a question about this problem here: http://moz.com/community/q/all-meta-descriptions-gone. I know about Google's own will to decide which META description will be shown. And also about unique content of the descriptions. All pages did have an optimized description before Panda 4.0 and there were no troubles at all, what tells me there is something else going on. I tested some things: Rewrote 50 descriptions to very uinique ones, only five got indexed. This tells me that duplicate content of the descriptions is not the problem (they have never been 100% duplicate, product type was a variable which was always different for each page). Removed cache in GWT and fetched again as Google, didn't help. I checked the pages I tested and they all have been indexed again without showing the optimized descriptions. More information: The first time I changed some META descriptions and fetched the pages again in GWT, Google picked up my new META descriptions and showed them. A few days later, most of them disappeared again (so Google is aware of the description but seems to ignore it). Some pages show the optimized description when I change my search query (only a few, mostly the optimized description never got shown) Technique is ok. Source code shows the right optimized description. META robots isn't blocking anything except NOODP/NOYDIR (always has blocked those). Websites using the exact same CMS, website template, META descriptions (style and build-up), do not have these problems I compared elements like place of description in source code, usage of meta robots, og:description, crawl-delay in robots.txt, and special characters in descriptions between websites that are showing optimized vs. website that don't show optimized descriptions. I can't find any connection. Something I noticed is a change is my Robots.txt file: my webmaster has added the following command:
Crawl-delay: 2 May this have to do with my problem? I guess it doens't. I did some research and there are more websites that are suffering this problem beside mine. This tells me it must be Google (and so Panda 4.0) that is responsible for this change. I realy want my optimized descriptions back. Does anybody have an idea what to do?
Thanks in advance. Marcel0 -
Noindex meta tag
Hi When following Webmaster Tools/Optimization/HTML Improvements it says that we have duplicate title tags and duplicate meta descriptions for hundreds of pages, As corrective action we have added to those pages and also changed title tags to make sure that they are different but still Webmaster keeps reporting that the duplication exist. Is it possible that google bot doesn't see our noindex code while crawling? By the way our seomoz report says that there is no duplicate title tag or meta description on our site google has crawled our site today and we received our report from seomoz today thanks
Technical SEO | | iskq0 -
Negative Effect of Duplicate Title Tags
Hi guys, I'm trying to figure out if one my problems with search rankings might be a result of 2 of my main pages (home page and tier 2 page linked to main menu) have the same title and description tags. Let's say my keyword is 'building paper airplanes'. The url for my homepage is http://domain.com and the Title Tag is "Building Paper Airplanes I Domain". My tier 2 page url is http://domain.com/building-paper-airplanes and the Title tag is "Building Paper Airplanes I Domain". The home page is more of an introduction page before the user gets into the instructions on the tier 2 page. Can anybody advise if this might be having a negative affect on my search results for the search term 'building paper airplanes'? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Rogs.SEO0 -
Is old domain better even if it was just parked?
Debating registering new domain or spending bucks for old domain, both with equivalent keywords. Normally old is better, but is this true even if the old name was just parked? In other words, is it worth spending $ for a domain that is not indexed or not ranked, just to get the aging? Options... [Keyword]Help.com - new, cheap [Keyword]Guide.com - old, not indexed, $ [Keyword]Info.com - old, indexed but not ranked anywhere (i.e., only found with exact match search), $$
Technical SEO | | draymond0