Meta tags DO matter — get it right for a change

UPDATE: October 26, 2008: It appears that someone advertising for SEO customers on Craigslist is referring to this article. SEO Theory does not endorse or recommend the services of the Craigslist advertiser or any other person, firm, or group who use SEO Theory articles to justify or promote their services.

The latest legal news roundup on SEOmoz includes an erroneous statement. Sarah Bird, Esquire writes about meta tags: “While not valuable for rankings, metatags (at least title and descriptive tags), are important for SEM. “.

Bullshit.

I don’t expect attorneys to understand search engine optimization as well as I do but when you make a statement that alleges both that meta tags are not valuable for rankings and that they are importent for S(earch) E(ngine) M(arketing), it’s time to stop and ask yourself if you know what you are talking about.

The keywords meta tag DOES influence rankings for Yahoo! and Ask. Anyone can test this. Just stick a unique expression in your keywords meta tag and watch your page rank for that expression on those search engines. Q.E.D.

Does the keywords meta tag make a difference in competitive queries? That depends on the competitive query. You can construct an unlimited number of hypothetical examples that favor the meta tag and that favor some other factor. Search engines take hundreds of “signals” into consideration when determining rankings and no one in the SEO industry is in a position to correctly tell us what is making a difference. Telling people that the keywords meta tag doesn’t matter is faux SEO.

However, virtually everyone in the industry will tell you that title tags for Web sites are vital to rankings. More than one survey has shown that the majority opinion heavily favors placing value on title tags. Then again, title tags are not meta tags — not in my opinion. If it doesn’t include “meta” in the tag structure, it’s not a meta tag. But most people would probably say, “Well, they’re all in the HEAD section so why not call them meta tags?”

I’ll leave the semantic arguments for another day, but even the people who feel that description meta tags don’t influence rankings are wrong. They may not be indexed for content but if you place duplicate meta tags on every page of your site your chances of controlling which page appears in search results (or of getting two pages to appear on the same SERP) have just decreased. Every first year SEO knows you’re supposed to have unique meta tags. Why? Because you don’t want to kick in the duplicate content filter, which generates that stupid omitted results link.

Sarah has been following U.S. court decisions regarding uses of meta tags and trademarks on the Web and I place considerable value in her legal analyses. But when it comes to meta tags the whole SEOmoz crew just ain’t got it right, and there are a lot of other people who ain’t got it right.

Search engines DO NOT ignore meta tags. Today’s search technology is more heavily dependent upon meta tags than the search technology of ten years ago. Ten years ago you used the keywords meta tag to get ranked for irrelevant content but the title and meta description really didn’t matter. That all changed. Now title tags are important and meta descriptions are used as cheap indicators of possibly duplicate content (and possibly as indicators of other things). Meta descriptions are also used in other ways by search engines.

Sarah makes a good point about the two cases she reviews in her blog post when she says: “The cases also demonstrate the varying levels of technological sophistication within the legal field.” Unfortunately, she follows up that good point with a bad point by suggesting that the judge in the Axiom case was using outdated information.

When popular SEO blogs can’t get the technology right, how can we possibly expect our court systems to understand what is going on?

The whole SEO industry reels like a drunken sailor on these types of issues because people confuse the value they place on optimization elements with the fact of such elements’ usage by search engines. That is, just because most people think the keywords meta tag doesn’t help in no way means it really doesn’t help. There are major search engines where it DOES help. And just because most people think that the description meta tag doesn’t have an impact on search rankings doesn’t mean that it has no such impact. There are major search engines where it DOES have an impact on rankings (and I’m talking about Google in particular).

How much weight or value you place on a meta tag is your opinion. How it works in the search engines is an entirely opinion-independent matter and in most cases it’s easily demonstrable that the meta tags and titles produce significant effects in the search results.

Search engine optimization may seem to be 90% bullshit and 10% fact but in reality it’s 80% luck and 20% design. Because we cannot determine precisely why search results change we all have to rely upon a smorgasboard of options and techniques. Ultimately, the search results change because:

1. We do something with our Web sites
2. Other people do something with their Web sites
3. The search engines do something with their data and algorithms
4. People change the way they search

Change is the only constant in this field, but opinions don’t amount to a hill of beans when it comes down to what actually drives search results. You cannot measure how much any particular link or on-page element influences a specific search results ranking. Anyone who believes they can measure such influences needs to publish their methodology for public scrutiny and verification. Until such time as that happens, we’re stuck with what we’ve got: the search results and the vague reasons for why they change.

You can run around the Web and collect opinions on whether the keywords meta tag is important and you’ll most likely find that most SEOs feel it’s not. That weight of opinion nonetheless doesn’t change the fact that the keywords meta tag DOES influence search results rankings on at least two major search engines (and who knows how many lesser engines).

You can create survey after survery and ask SEOs if the meta description influences rankings and if you consistently get results favoring the “it doesn’t influence rankings” position that weight of opinion still won’t change the fact that Google will eliminate pages from search results simply because the meta descriptions are duplicate.

The takeaway from all of this should be that SEOs (and their legal counsel) need to exercise considerable restraint in how they share their opinions on meta tags. I can walk into any court and prove that Sarah Bird made erroneous statements about meta tags beyond a reasonable doubt (and that is, as I understand it, beyond what is usually called for in civil litigations). I’ll put the search results up against the entire SEO industry’s weighted opinions every time, and the search results will win every time.

You cannot change the fact that these meta tags DO influence search results by dismissing them and saying, “Well, maybe so, but they’re just not that important”.

That is an entirely different matter.

Disclaimer: There are no guarantees that search engines will continue to use meta tags and other HEAD content to influence their results. The statements made in this post are based on knowledge of current and past search engine results and are not in any way forward-looking.