META Tags and search engine bots

BaronGreenBack

Am I right in assuming that meta tags are virtually dead? Crawlers such as googlebot dont use them, going more for relevance of links to your site and its content? Meta tags seem to have been abused by marketing companies and now the search engines have caught on. Any links/info on the subject?

Thanks

chabsey

BaronGreenBack wrote:

Am I right in assuming that meta tags are virtually dead? Crawlers such as googlebot dont use them, going more for relevance of links to your site and its content? Meta tags seem to have been abused by marketing companies and now the search engines have caught on. Any links/info on the subject?

Thanks

Depends...if you're solely optimising your site for google then you can probably leave them out. However, some people have reported that Google still occasionally uses some META elements when presenting site summaries. If you do up a decent set of meta tags it doesn't actually take that long to change them on each page. Personally I'd leave them in, some search engines might have a use for them and if they don't take that long then why not?

mneylon

Do a few search queries in google. Have a look at the output.