Tuesday, December 04, 2007
In writing and maintaining accurate meta
tags (for example, descriptive titles and robots
information), you help Google to more accurately crawl, index and return your site in search
results. Meta tags provide information to all sorts of clients, such as browsers and search
engines. Just keep in mind that each client will likely only interpret the meta
tags that it uses,
and ignore the rest (although they might be useful for other reasons).
Here's how Google would interpret meta
tags of this sample HTML page:
<!DOCTYPE ...> <head> <title>Traditional Swiss cheese fondue recipes<title> # Utilized by Google, accuracy is valuable to webmasters <meta name="description" content="Cheese fondue is ..."> # Utilized by Google, can be shown in our search results <meta name="revisit-after" content="14 days"> # Not utilized by Google or other major search engines <META name="verify-v1" content="e8JG...Nw=" /> # Optional, for Google Webmaster Tools <meta name="GoogleBot" content="noOdp"> # Optional <meta ...> <meta ...> </head>
<meta name="description" content="A description of the page">
This tag provides a short description of the page. In some situations this description is used as
a part of the snippet shown in the search results. For more information, learn how to
Improve snippets with a meta description makeover
and create good titles and
snippets in Search Results. While the use of a
description meta
tag is optional and will have no effect on your rankings, a good description can
result in a better snippet, which in turn can help to improve the quality and quantity of visitors
from our search results.
<title>The title of the page</title>
While technically not a meta
tag, this tag is often used together with the "description." The
contents of this tag are generally shown as the title in search results (and of course in the
user's browser when visiting the page or viewing bookmarks). Some additional information can be
found in our blog post
Target visitors or search engines?,
especially under "Make good use of page titles."
<meta name="robots" content="..., ...">
and <meta name="googlebot" content="..., ...">
-
nofollow
: Don't follow links from this page when looking for new pages to crawl (also see Block or remove pages usingmeta
tags). -
nosnippet
: Don't show a snippet of this page when displaying it in the search results. -