: New META TAGS with positive effects for seo ranking in 2011 and beyond I'm trying to make an up to date chart of meta tags, for all of us, with their purposes, their use and their good

@Sherry384

I think this article really sums the current status of meta tags up well:
The wonderful world of meta tags

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@Lee4591628

Dude, I'm really trying to not be a pain in the ass guy but... This seems to be useless just invent things.

Yeah, I know, this can be one of two: just for fun (and see what other people that make web think) OR a real intention to create something to be used.

If you are on the second option, I need to inform some paths you seem to ignore at this point: meta tags are standardized. And who makes standards at this moment are W3C and WHATWG.

So I'd recommend you to:


Read current specs and working drafts
Read development storyline for those specs. Sometimes you are proposing something that have been already denied, and for a good reason.
Join the mailing lists and propose what you think that should be good.
Before step above, read how people use to propose things. That will make other people hear you better.
Keep in mind that SEO isn't one of the concerns from standard-makers.
It would also great you know a bit of history of WHATWG. In a short: the leader is Ian Hixie, one of google heads.


Good luck.

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@Megan663

If to rank 1st it would suffice to cheat with the meta tags, Google results would be just an infinite long string with one single result because we would all rank in 1st position.

IMHO META TAGS are old stuff for SEO, except for one the META DESCRIPTION.

This is ignored by Google for ranking, but it's shown as a snippet in Google results. When it's well written it might lead to more people willing to click on the result that brings to your site.

To go specifically to your table, keywords are ignored by Google too. And taking care to be 1st with serach engine other than Google is waste of time for two good reasons:


if you look ta the stats of any of
your websites I bet only 1 on
1000 accesses come from a search
engine that is not Google.
When you are 1st in Google you
usually rank excellent also on other
search engines.


You don't need to set index/follow in a meta tags robots either, search engine look 1st if you have a robots.txt file unless you Disallow some pages there they will go on crawling your site, it's not that writing follow makes Google say: "ohh, let's follow it because he suggests me to do it!"

The language tag can bring some benefit but I think Google is able to detcet the language of your page on its own, I use it to easily detect page language from JS, so I use it anyway without thinking at SEO.

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@Annie201

I consider only the description and robots tag for useful.
The rest of them hardly add any value.

Even the meta description tag is sometimes ignored by Google (unless a robots="noodp,noydir" is specified) and uses description and/or title from the DMOZ and Yahoo! directories. I can give this as an example (check out the first result).

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