Yes – that is an important point.

The best sites are resilient to whatever changes the search engines make in their algorithms and approaches – and that’s the only real way to develop a sustainable online business. You don’t want to have to work on your site every time the algorithms change.

And one way of making your site resilient to Search Engine changes is to follow the agreed standards when you’re building it. (It’s not the only way, but it’s a good start).

Cheers,

Martin.

I tried to check it out but you must have taken the page down recently – it’s just parked with Go Daddy and has a whole bunch of links on it now,

Cheers,

Martin.

Your contributions have improved the quality of info for other readers and given me an opportunity to clarify different points.

All good!

Cheers,

Martin.

Either way, we both agree that the description tag is still useful and should be defined.

I love the point you made in the article about using noindex for download pages!

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I certainly agree with you on the importance of link back and relevancy as ways of ranking well in the search results. I also agree that CSS definitions should be kept in a separate file (a single separate file) – but this is more for site performance than search results placings.

However, I would have to disagree with your view of the description tag.

The descriptions I place in my description tag fields consistently appear in the description field of the search results, on all pages of all my sites. The only exceptions are where the search term that the searcher has entered appears somewhere in my content.

On those occasions both Google and Yahoo extract that particular phrase and display it in the description field.

Also, in my view, the title field is important because it’s what’s displaid to searchers in the search results. Without a good Title tag (as well as a good description) people will be less likely to click through. The title and description tags, and the content of the page, need to be consistent for best results.

I do agree that there’s no real need to add the Robots tag with index,follow as its content, because they will index and follow by default.

But if you don’t want a page indexed then using the robots tag is one of the ways you can prevent that. I used the example above of a download page – if this is for a paid product you (or at least I) wouldn’t want someone to stumble across it because it had been indexed and turned up in a set of search results.

On my blogs I don’t want my admin pages indexed – so those are other pages where I use ‘noindex,nofollow’ in the robots tag

So until the standards are changed to exclude the need for META tags I’ll continue to use them fully, for the reasons I discussed above.

Cheers,

Martin.

I believe SE’s have gotten to the point where they don’t need or trust the actual page developers description of the page anymore. Instead, ranking is simply awarded in terms of linkback and relevancy.

Anyway, I still tell people to clearly define their keywords and descriptions, it helps the content writer keep on his/her toes about the keywords they should be using to write the article of content. The description meta tag is usually pulled from submission sites and stands for the default description of the content.

I am against the use of unneccessary meta tags, like using the robots tag and saying follow,index. That’s just a waste of code. The ‘code-to-content’ ratio of your pages must stay low so the search spiders dont have to sift through too much to get to the content on your page. All CSS definitions and javascript files should go in seperate files, you need to keep the code short and clean.

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