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
-
Pages with duplicate meta descriptions
We have around 17 pages have underscores in the URL. From the 17 pages, we have changed 3 pages URL for example if the url is test_sample_demo.html, we have changed as test-sample-demo.html After the updates, we have made redirect as follows Redirect 301 test_sample_demo.html test-sample-demo.html Presently google webmaster tool shows as "Pages with duplicate meta descriptions" & "Pages with duplicate title tags" for changed pages How to fix this. Please help us
Technical SEO | | Intellect0 -
Canonical Tags - Do they only apply to internal duplicate content?
Hi Moz, I've had a complaint from a company who we use a feed from to populate a restaurants product list.They are upset that on our products pages we have canonical tags linking back to ourselves. These are in place as we have international versions of the site. They believe because they are the original source of content we need to canonical back to them. Can I please confirm that canonical tags are purely an internal duplicate content strategy. Canonical isn't telling google that from all the content on the web that this is the original source. It's just saying that from the content on our domains, this is the original one that should be ranked. Is that correct? Furthermore, if we implemented a canonical tag linking to Best Restaurants it would de-index all of our restaurants listings and pages and pass the authority of these pages to their site. Is this correct? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | benj20341 -
What punctuation can you use in meta tags? Are there any Google does not like?
So I know you can use dashes and | in meta tags, but can anyone tell me what other punctuation you can use? Also, it'd be great to know what punctuation you can't use. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Trevorneo1 -
H1 tag options
Hi, Working on a website and the developer has asked some questions about the h1 tag placement... So the main page has a bold heading named 'Overview' which then has a left hand navigation to tab through the content which appears next to the nav. The main content then has a heading and content below it. The 'Overview' heading appears on all pages of the left nav so really shouldn't be the H1 tag as it would cause duplication. One option we have thought about is to have the right hand heading above the content be the h1, and it has been suggested to stylize the 'Overview' heading but it won't actually be an h1. My question is would this have any negative impact on SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Canonical tag for Home page: with or without / at the end???
Setting up canonical tags for an old site. I really need advice on that darn backslash / at the end of the homepage URL. We have incoming links to the homepage as http://www.mysite.com (without the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/ (with the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/index.html I know that there should be 301 redirects to just one version, but I need to know more about the canonical tags... Which should the canonical tag be??? (without the backslash) or (with the backslash) Thanks for your help! 🙂
Technical SEO | | GregB1230 -
Changing title tags, do we need 301 redirects
I found many duplicate title tags and I'm in the process of changing it Do I need 301 redirects in place when I switch it? I am only changing the title tag. Also, we are switching over to a new site very soon, I am worried that we might be using too many 301 redirect "hops" because we are doing a lot of optimization as well. (video from matt cutts describing 301 redirects and hops: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA. Does anyone have any experience in doing too many redirect hops that it affected your rankings? Any good ideas to avoid this?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Fix duplicate content caused by tags
Hi everyone, TGIF. We are getting hundreds of duplicate content errors on our WP site by what appears to be our tags. For each tag and each post we are seeing a duplicate content error. I thought I had this fixed but apparently I do not. We are using the Genesis theme with Yoast's SEO plugin. Does anyone have the solution to what I imagine is this easy fix? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | okuma0 -
Duplicate title tags and meta description tags
According to GWT, it seems that some of the pages on my website have duplicate title and meta tags. The pages identified by Google are nothing but dynamic pages: http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php
Technical SEO | | sbrault74
http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php?param=1
http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php?param=2 The thing is that I do use the canonical link tag on all pages. Should I also use the "robots noindex" tag when the page is invoked using a GET parameter? Again sorry for my english. Thank you, Stephane1