Recently I had looked up some old information on meta tags for a friend of mine. It seems that there are a lot of places out there still preaching the meta keywords tag as the holy grail of SEO and my friend wanted to make sure that she done them right. I went ahead and provided the requested information along with a few choice excerpts from other authors on the current state of meta tags in general.
Now, some folks are saying that meta tags are dead. This I don’t buy. That’s not to say that I bother with them on every website I build, but I do feel that they have their uses. And I will concede that meta tags are in the process of dying, even at the point where the doctors are telling the meta next of kin to start making funeral arrangements.
But now, this month, MSN comes out with a new use for them. MSN, like other search engines, has long used descriptions from the Open Directory Project (ODP) over at dmoz.org for the websites in their search results. Thus if your site’s description at ODP wasn’t written well, you were just screwed in certain engines. Realizing this, MSN went looking for a way to allow webmasters to choose whether or not to use the ODP description. The result? Website owners can now opt-out of having their site displayed with it’s ODP description by adding a simple meta tag to the pages. Something similar to:
<META NAME=”msnbot” CONTENT=”NOODP”>
And, if the other search engines that use ODP descriptions decide to hop on board you could use the following:
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>
The only downside to the whole idea is that meta tags are page level. So, if you have a couple thousand pages on your website and they’re not dynamically generated, you better have a text editor with a great find and replace feature.
Back to the meta tags in general, will this new entry be enough to cause a resurgence in the use of meta tags or are they too far gone to save? Only time will tell. But I think ol man meta will make it out of the hospital and into a nice little nursing home where he can continue to annoy the heck out of web site owners for years to come.
