Some topics are so shrouded in mystery, they can divide the very SEO experts themselves. Nowhere is this more true than the ubiquitous meta tag. Sure, you’ve written a fantastic meta description, volunteered some of your more important meta keywords (even if you are unsure how much impact the latter will have).

But what next? What other meta tags should you include? Here are just some of the meta tags I see in wide use on the web:

<meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1“>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”meta tags, rogue meta tags, useless meta tags, dangerous meta tags” />
<meta name=”description” content=”The Manchester SEO Blog guide to meta tags, rogue meta tags and downright dangerous ones.” />
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”3;URL=http://manchester-seo-blog.co.uk/”>
<meta name=”robots” content=”would you pass the Turing test?” />
<meta name=”title” content=”Redundant Meta Title” />
<meta name=”rating” content=”unsuitable for homosapiens” />
<meta name=”distribution” content=”global” />
<meta name=”publisher” content=”Rogue Meta Tag Technology Ltd.” />
<meta name=”author” content=”John Doe“>
<meta name=”designer” content=”Jane Doe“>
<meta name=”copyright” content=”Rogue Meta Tag Technology Ltd. All Rights Reserved“>
<meta name=”abstract” content=”A brief overview of some of the more useful, the useless and the downright dangerous meta tags people use on their web pages.“>

In this post, I hope to provide you with a brief overview to the jungle of meta tags.

Useful Meta Tags and Robots

<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />
<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noimageindex” />

Some meta tags can be used to give the robots supplemental information about your page and modify their default behaviour. Meta keywords and description have already been discussed. Robots, is highly useful one which you can direct at all crawlers by specifying “robots” or to a specific crawler such as “googlebot”. You can use directives such as: noindex (do not index), nofollow (do not follow links on this page), noarchive (do not store cached copy of page), noodp (do not use DMOZ description), noydir (do not use the description from Yahoo directory). Not all robots are polite, and at the time of writing, only Googlebot, Yahoo and Bing/MSN/Live crawlers respect these directives. Googlebot also supports: noimageindex (do not index images on page), notranslate (do not offer to translate the page) and unavailable_after (will not recommend for search after a particular date)

Other Useful Meta Tags

There are a small number of other useful meta tags, such as:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”3;URL=http://manchester-seo-blog.co.uk/”>
<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en-US,fr”>

The first will cause your brower to refresh the page after X seconds (where X is the first number in the content section). You can also specify a URL and use this to redirect your page. But this is the worst kind of redirect, as any SEO expert will say, you are better using a 301 redirect. The second meta tag allows you to specify the language content of the page itself. (see later for multiple language meta tags)

The Redundant Meta Tags

All major Search Engines will ignore meta tags such as: rating, distribution, rating,  author, designer and publisher. You may have your own reasons for including these, but do not expect them to make a difference in your websites rank! Some (such as the ‘rating’ meta tag) were genuinely proposed as a method for allowing webmasters to set the ‘age appropriateness’ of web pages. The difficulty is that without the backing of W3C, it is not standard. Without a set standard, we cannot expect search engines to habitually use meta tags like these. There is also an issue of honesty when reporting on the self :- if you are a webmaster who runs a site, would you wilfully restrict access to your website?

Meta Tags in Multiple Languages

The W3C consortium have proposed a method in which you may specify several different sets of meta tags in different languages within the same page, by using the lang=”" form. For example:

<meta name=”keywords” lang=”en-us” content=”vacation, Greece, sunshine”>
<meta name=”keywords” lang=”en” content=”holiday, Greece, sunshine”>
<meta name=”keywords” lang=”fr” content=”vacances, Gr&egrave;ce, soleil”>
<meta name=”keywords” lang=”ja” content=”空室, ギリシャ, 日照”>

Summary

If in doubt – leave it out! Google and most other search engines will make very good guesses about your page based on the content itself. If you are not sure how to use the meta tag, it is best not to! You may find interesting ways of shooting yourself in the foot by asking search engines to not index or cache your page. It is always better to err on the side of caution, and (as ever) look to W3C as a guide.

The Manchester SEO Blog takes a look one of the more common problems that often befalls the less Web savvy, duplicate content.  Even those with more SEO experienced often developer a number of misconceptions. Google aims to maintain an exciting variety of results for a particular key phrase, so the more dissimilar your page is to the next most similar one, the more reason Google has to rank your website higher! Equally, the quickest way to get your website taken out of the search results altogether is to simply copy pages from another website.

Sometimes Duplicated Text Content is Unavoidable.

Greg Grothaus

Engineer, Google Search Quality

Search Engine Strategies Conference.

Obvious, no? Heh, well … no actually. Have you ever replied to someone in a forum, and quoted their original post? Have you copied the manufacturers specifications for a product that you supply? If Newtons laws of motion are altered by even a single word, then the definitions would be wrong.

So how do we know when copying is okay? How do you we know it is SEO compliant?  Well, the first questions is about purpose. Imitation is the highest form of flattery, and if a wide number of people use similar words to describe your website (and include a link) Google will come to associate those words with your site. However, if these descriptions supplied with the link to your site are identical word-for-word, Google will suspect something is not quite right. The most likely cause of this, is the same person copying and pasting the same description on several sites in order to obtain more back-links for their own site.

The same is true of your pages – you can rewrite a known article in your own words, and expect it to rank without any problems.  You can even include small blocks of identically duplicated text content and expect this to not affect your search position, provided at least the same amount of text again comes from yourself. It’s all about what you bring to the Web:

Ask not what the Internet can do for you, but what together we can contribute to the content of the Web.

If you need to include the manufacturers technical specifications for a product, could you also provide room for some customer reviews or feedback about the product? Perhaps the page could feature threads of chatter and advice about using the device?  Whatever the reason you have for including the duplicate text, think what you can give your visitors to supplement it.

Perhaps your company has several domains. All you need to do in order to get multiple, independent listings is find a reason to alter the text. Aside from issues such as hidden text, search engines aren’t too concerned if your sites look alike. If you just want the one domain, then you could set up a 301 redirection on all your domains onto your main one.

As always, the goal is thinking about your target audience, working out what they want and deciding what unique content you can bring to their Internet experience.