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Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 04/22/07 06:47
Scripsit El Kabong:
> Well, you know what? These search engine people seem to be
> deliberately trying to confuse us hillbilly coders.
Yes, they are, for very good reasons.
> For instance, here's what I usually drop in on my pages, but always
> on the index page:
If the stuff would matter on an index page, it would matter far more on
content pages.
> <META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="ALL,FOLLOW,INDEX">
With content="all", that's the default. I wouldn't be so sure that the
incantation you have there is actually recognized by all indexing robots.
Thus, you have no odds of making any positive difference but a small chance
of messing things up.
> <META NAME="Revisit-After" CONTENT="30 Days">
You wish. If that accomplishes anything, it makes a robot visit less often
than it would do otherwise.
> <META NAME="Distribution" CONTENT="Global">
Try <meta name="impact" content="conquer the world">. Neither pseudomagic
tag has any effect, but if there were an effect, the latter would be much
cooler!
> <TITLE></TITLE> [max length: 12 words]
So you _only_ put a title element on your index page, or what? And you have
an artificial length restriction on it? The _useful_ limitation is in terms
of characters, but the simple rule is: as long as needed to describe the
content of the particular page in any context, but not a character longer.
> <META NAME="Description" CONTENT=""> [max length: 25 words]
> <META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT=""> [max length: 10 words or phrases]
Pointless babble. These widely abused tags are widely ignored, for good
reasons. Robots that still pay attention to them probably give them the same
weight as normal text, so you would do much more productive work by
concentrating in improving the actual textual content.
> <META NAME="Title" CONTENT=" "> [same as <TITLE> above]
Pointless. You just increase the size of the HTML file.
> <META NAME="Copyright" CONTENT="©">
That's really clueless, isn't it?
> <META NAME="Subject" CONTENT="">
> <META NAME="Language" CONTENT="English">
> <META NAME="Designer" CONTENT="">
> <META NAME="Author" CONTENT="">
> <META NAME="Publisher" CONTENT="">
Pointless. You could keep inventing META tags forever, or copying them from
obscure sources. This would hurt just yourself, but promoting the idea of
META babble in public means that you are actively trying to convert others
to this dummy magic.
> Now I have no idea whether any of these has any effect at all
I do believe that.
> I usually get fair results,
You didn't actually compare the results between pages that lack the META
nonsense and pages that have it, to varying extent? Right, I knew that.
> And looking confused.
The point is that you are confusing others, especially newbies.
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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