Under such circumstances, a definitive understanding of the role of meta tags in SEO is unlikely. ===The keywords attribute=== The keywords attribute was popularized by search engines such as Infoseek and AltaVista in 1995, and its popularity quickly grew until it became one of the most commonly used meta elements. No consensus exists whether or not the keywords attribute has any effect on ranking at any of the major search engines today.
The Director of Research at Google, Monika Henzinger, was quoted (in 2002) as saying, "Currently we don't trust metadata because we are afraid of being manipulated." Other search engines developed techniques to penalize Web sites considered to be "cheating the system".
To give webmasters the option to specify that the Open Directory Project content should not be used for listings of their website, Microsoft introduced in May 2006 the new "NOODP" value for the "robots" element of the meta tags.
Google followed in July 2006 and Yahoo! in October 2006. The syntax is the same for all search engines who support the tag. Webmasters can decide if they want to disallow the use of their ODP listing on a per search engine basis Google: Yahoo! MSN and Live Search (via bingbot, previously msnbot): =====NOYDIR===== Yahoo! puts content from their own Yahoo! directory next to the ODP listing.
For example, <meta http-equiv="expires" content="Wed, 21 June 2006 14:25:27 GMT"> would tell the browser that the page "expires" on June 21, 2006 at 14:25:27 GMT and that it may safely cache the page until then.
With respect to Google, thirty-seven leaders in search engine optimization concluded in April 2007 that the relevance of having keywords in the meta-attribute keywords is little to none and in September 2009 Matt Cutts of Google announced that they were no longer taking keywords into account whatsoever.
In 2007 they introduced a meta tag that lets web designers opt-out of this. Adding the NOYDIR tag to a page will prevent Yahoo! from displaying Yahoo! Directory titles and abstracts. =====Robots-NoContent===== Yahoo! also introduced in May 2007 the attribute value: class="robots-nocontent".
With respect to Google, thirty-seven leaders in search engine optimization concluded in April 2007 that the relevance of having keywords in the meta-attribute keywords is little to none and in September 2009 Matt Cutts of Google announced that they were no longer taking keywords into account whatsoever.
In October 2009 Search Engine Round Table announced that "Yahoo Drops The Meta Keywords Tag Also" but later reported that the announcement made by Yahoo!'s Senior Director of Search was incorrect.
In the corrected statement Yahoo! Senior Director of Search states that "…What changed with Yahoo's ranking algorithms is that while we still index the meta keyword tag, the ranking importance given to meta keyword tags receives the lowest ranking signal in our system … it will actually have less effect than introducing those same words in the body of the document, or any other section." In Sept 2012, Google announced that they will consider Keyword Meta tag for news publishers.
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