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Are meta tags still being used in web ranking?



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Are meta tags still being used in web ranking?

Meta keywords used to be considered as a good on page SEO technique. Meta tags were considered to be a good way for search engines to read and index sites. However I have heard that they no longer have that sort of power to help a site rank well in search engine results.

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Beverly
In reference to use of meta keywords for ranking, Matt Cutts summarized it nicely by saying, '... we don't use that information in our ranking even the least little bit'.



However, just to clarify, meta keyword is a type of meta tags. And, you can't ignore all meta tags as they are useful to help Google identify information about your site and even if they don't help you rank, meta tags (such as well written meta description) can improve click-throughs from Google search results.

A list of most commonly used meta tags include:
  • meta description
  • meta title
  • robots (i.e. nofollow, no snippet)
  • Google site (owner) verification


https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en

In another place, Matt Cutts specifically said, '... you shouldn't spend any time on the meta keywords tag. We don't use it.'

However, in reference to Meta Tags, he went on to stress the importance of using a really well written meta description (meta tag) as this can be used by Google for creating a 'snippet' shown in search results.




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Drake83
Search engines stopped using them a long time ago as ranking factors/indicators because of the massive abuse they faced. People were putting fake keywords, descriptions and titles just to rank higher. However, that being said, I know that Google still reads them and even uses the description meta tag in some search result snippets. Google even says as much here: https://support.google.com/webmast...swer/35624?hl=en (under Create good meta descriptions).



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Corzhens
Do you mean to say that we can change the title of the site just like that? I wonder why you called it fake titles and descriptions when they can be real. I mean how do you determine that the title and description are fake? Anyway I think the title, description and keyword are still being used for the purposes of ranking because the keyword in particular is still popular with website owners.



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anwebservices
As far as i know, meta keywords and meta description does NOT help in web ranking or SERP for long time, but they are still important when it comes to quality SEO of your website and for some crawlers from smaller search engines which use older technologies and different algorithms then Google, Bing etc... So it's still good to have them.



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ajlancer
Hi as per as I know google finally stopped providing PR. But as search technique Google still indexing Meta tag as search term. So it should be good still for SEO for your web site. And other search engine still counting this part. So you can not evade it for your website.



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