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by MartinCron 5427 days ago
Pages have Appropriate Meta Tags.

Serious question. Does this have any impact anymore?

2 comments

To answer you question directly, yes.

In a nutshell,

* The keywords meta tag is no longer used.

* The robots meta tag is extremely useful.

* The description tag may be used to display along with a page's title.

* Neither description nor keywords meta tag have much impact for SEO.

Personally, I don't use the keyword meta tag and I may or may not use the description meta tag.

Somewhere out there, there is a search engine that still uses keyword tags for something significant, but I doubt that search engine is Bing (which now powers itself and US/Canada Yahoo).

References:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-do...

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...

http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-search-no-longer-uses-meta...

Thank you for the informed reply. I appreciate it.
Yes. Google will (sometimes?) display what you put into <meta name="description" content="here" /> as abstract on the search results page. This makes it very easy to optimise what people see on there instead of making Google guess what to show.