Meta Description tags - Meta keywords tag Do they help in search engine rankings Search engine optimization tip Monday 14th february 2005

Meta description and meta keywords tags are used in olden days when the search engines didnt have crawler capabilities and cannot crawl a whole site, They used to read only those tags and evaluate a sites ranking based on that, Later search engine spammers got aware of this tactic and started abusing these tags a lot, they just stuffed keywords in these tags,



Then crawler based search engines came into existence and they started seeing much more on a site than just just meta tags, they say onpage factors including alt tags, visible text on the page etc, Slowly the use of meta tags by search engines have become lesser,

But not all top search engines completely dropped using these days, Various top search engines use various meta tags for different reasons,

Yahoo uses meta description tag as part of their ranking algorithm, they see the keywords in that and use it with all the other factors of a site, similarly MSN uses meta description tag in their ranking algorithm, We have proved the above in our tests across these search engines, Also we have proved yahoo and MSN doesn't use the meta keywords tag,

When it comes to google, NO they don't use meta description tags,

How we tested for google??



We made up some bizarre phrases and added them to the meta description tag, only our site has those phrases, so when we search for those phrases in search engines we don't see the result coming up so mostly google don't use the meta description tags in their algorithm, But google uses snippets of meta description, google indexes the tag and during query time if the relevant words are present in the meta tags they just fetch it and display it, So it never hurts to add the relevant phrases to the page in the description tag, Keywords tag is completely ignored so we can just forget it,

SEO Blog Team,