Whatever Happened to the META Tag?

When was the last time you saw a HTML header like this?

The web is a metadata-free zone. It's widely known that Google completely ignores metadata in its indexes. The <meta> tag has fallen so far out of favor that it drags the whole concept of metadata down with it. And perhaps rightfully so. Cory Doctorow viciously deconstructs metadata in Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia:


This is a companion discussion topic for the original blog entry at: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/11/whatever-happened-to-the-meta-tag.html

One clarification: the META description tag is indeed used by Google. Not to determine search result ranking, of course, but to determine which snippet of text to display next to the search result:

http://www.highrankings.com/metadescription.htm

I verified this with a google search. It’s pretty handy, actually, since Google can make some really awkward decisions about what text to display next to a search result.

Who, exactly, is adding The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set to the section of their web pages? Nobody, that’s who.

Surprisingly many pages actually have DC metadatas (compared to the desert I thought I would find).
Try installing the Dublin Core Viewer extension if you’re using Firefox, you’ll see the icon switch to orange (from gray) from time to time.

Well, there’s metadata and there’s metadata. Intelligently designed blog entries include an rdf island that promotes auto-trackback discovery. Purely optional. But given the limited number of people writing blog software, it seems to work out relatively well – virtually any blog on a well-known platform includes the rdf, users are none the wiser, and stuff like auto-trackbacks works out nicely.

Not a huge big deal or anything, but a small example of where some purely optional metadata, defined for a limited audience, seems to work out well.

Two questions:

  1. Why does Google ignore meta tags? Shoot, if the biggest player blows off a nominal standard (well, suggestion), that’s pretty much gonna be it for that tag, no?

  2. I am under the (perhaps false) impression that cache-related meta tags are honored by, like, proxies and stuff. Is that true?

I have meta http-equiv=“Content-Language” content=“en” / at a minimum in my pages. You get XHTML validation warnings if you don’t specify a default language.

Ok, so it stripped my code.

meta http-equiv=“Content-Language” content=“en”

Cache tags are used by proxies and browsers - their vocabularies are technical, and do not affect page-rank, so they don’t get stuffed full of index spam. These tags are functional rather than descriptive.

Telling your caching proxy that you’d like the page cached for “Hot Jaguar Pics, Hot Jaguar Action” won’t help. :slight_smile:

We use some of the Dublin Core metadata!

Okay, it’s really for our own personal reference. We use content management, and wanted some way to be able to check the creation date of our pages via “View Source” … lo and behold, the Dublin Core had a nicely standardized way of publishing “extended attributes” like dates.

Check it out for yourself. a href="http://www.tronox.com/"http://www.tronox.com//a and view source.

Why does Google ignore meta tags? Shoot, if the biggest player blows off a nominal standard (well, suggestion), that’s pretty much gonna be it for that tag, no?

For all the reasons Cory Doctorow listed: considered as a collective whole, people are stupid, lazy liars. And people certainly aren’t objective when asked to describe themselves or things they have a financial stake in.

http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm

Metadata might work if an external entity was assigning it to the pages rather than the authors, but then you’re almost back in automated metadata land.

I am under the (perhaps false) impression that cache-related meta tags are honored by, like, proxies and stuff. Is that true?

As Christian pointed out, these (language, caching, etc) aren’t descriptive, they’re functional. In other words, they can tell you what language the page is in, but they can’t tell you if it’s any good.