Are Meta Tags Extinct?

A few weeks ago, someone brought an interesting concept to my attention. They claimed that by not using keyword and description meta tags at all in their web pages, they were actually able to get better rankings in Google and Yahoo than before when they used the meta tags.


Read the full article here: Are Meta Tags Extinct?

For more discussion go here: Blog Article Discussion

Interesting experiment... it seem to be very interest and nice to uncorver the fact that metatags are not usefull anymore or well at least as they were long time ago...

There are some things that i dont see concluyent in this article.. like this:



Well this is very obvious in certain levels beacuse generally the newbies are the ones that always use metatags and alot of them, and like they think that is the most important thing well they just dont do more research and SEO to their websites..

Personally i dont use them, i use meta description beacuse of the type of websites i rank, which are ussually flash ones and i need to let the SE know what to put in the description of the website when the search results display.

When i tried it once, Msn displayed content found on the left side (In left side mostly we will have external links or links to other pages of our sites).

So , i shifed the links to the right and added the main content on the left.

Just an example from one of our sites.,
http://www.muslimmatrimonial.com/Muslim_Marriage_Traditions-7

Here yahoo and msn displays same description, But google seems to pluck description from the content and the charecters in descripions was between 145 to 154

I tried a test on this concept about a year ago, and I didn't seem to find a real conclusive results.... I do like the concept though of a site "appearing" to care about what search engines think of the site or rankings... Generally, a site with no meta tags is a clear sign that it is not being worked on from an SEO perspective, but I never really found and solid results despite the fact that I believe it would work.....

I still think this type of reverse psychology needs more testing..... I feel pretty confident that a no meta tag site with some good inbound link building would do well, but like I said, the test I ran was about a year ago or more.....

Yes this make sence... yes i agree with you i think it need more research, i still dont think that in the mayor SE will affect, but the negative effect is the one i am looking for, if it exist it could be good to know beacuse i work with flash websites and meta-description is used by me all the time

We recently did some research on this topic and in our results we saw that the pages that had a meta description did better. It didn't matter what was in the description, just that it was present. Search engines may like this just so they have something to easily stick in the descriptions on the results like incdeveloper said.