WWGD - What Would Google Do?


    I just received an email from one of the programming sites I subscribe to about Google and some of the things Google does and does not use to rank your web page(s). The article was about the meta tag "KEYWORDS", but there were links to similar articles on other topics involving Google. So, of course I had to read them all...

Much of this is common knowledge, but I thought it would be nice to have this information consolidated in one convenient place. Another consideration is that this information is time sensitive - policies change and so old information may be outdated. But at the moment, these are the truths we program our web pages by:

1) KEYWORDS meta tag - Google ignores the meta tag "keywords" although other search engines still use it. Their reason they quit using this tag (about 10 years ago according to the article) is because it was being so heavily abused. Too many people did (and many still do) put keywords in their KEYWORDS meta tag which do not reflect the actual content of the page.  HINT: if you don't use the word in your page text, then it probably doesn't belong in the KEYWORDS meta tag.

On a side note - Google does sell a Google Search Appliance, which does have the ability to utilize the Keywords meta tag, but that is completely separate from the main web search.

2) DESCRIPTION meta tag - If it impresses them, Google may use (all or part of) the DESCRIPTION meta tag as the description in a search result. Alternately they may use snippets from the text on your web page.

3) ROBOTS meta tag (or GOOGLEBOT meta tag) - this tag can control the behavior of the the search engine crawling and indexing pages on your site. With this tag you can use any of the following values:
    noindex - prevents the page from being indexed
    nofollow - prevents the Googlebot from following links from this page
    nosnippet - prevents a snippet from being shown in the search results
    noodp - prevents the alternative description form the ODP/DMOS from being used
    noarchive - prevents Google from showing the cached link for a page
    unavailable_after.[date] - lets you specify the exact time and date you want to stop crawling and indexing of this page
    noimageindex - prevents your page from appearing as the refering page for an image search

4) GOOGLE meta tag (with content="notranslate") - When the search engine user gets a page in a language he is unlikely to know, Google often provides a link to a translation of the page into his language. This tag prevents Google from doing so.

5) verify-v1 meta tag - You can use this tag on the top-level page of your site to verify ownership for Webmaster Tools.
    NOTE: I purposely wrote this tag in lower case because this tag NEEDS to be in lower case. Generally speaking the other meta tags are not case-sensitive. 

6) HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" meta tag - This tag defines the page's content type and character set.

7) HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" meta tag - This tag sends the user to a new URL after a certain amount of time. (not supported by all browsers)

8) TITLE tag - While technically not a meta tag, Google often uses the Title of your page along with the description.

    Now, your web site may not need to use all of these meta tags. Likewise there are plenty of other meta tags your web site may use. If Google comes across a meta tag it does not recognize, it simply ignores the tag.

What other meta tags you use for  your web sites?