Jason Glick, Yahoo!’s Search Manager recently announced that Yahoo! does indeed read meta tags as part of its ranking criterion. Will this be a resurgence in meta tags? Are they needed? I always said yes.
The biggest reason people don’t use them is because Google ignores them. Not so much for spam reasons, but because they believe their spider can correctly read and rank a site without them. (Though the original reason many engines stopped using them was many webmasters were loading the meta keyword tags with false data.) Many of the major search engines skip them, but with Yahoo! now reading them, the debate of their usefulness may go up a notch.
Including meta tags in a site is a fairly minor exercise. It’s better to be safe than sorry. But the reason I do it has nothing to do with Yahoo. Let me mention one engine that uses meta tags: Aeiwi. Most people haven’t heard of it, but it’s been around a while and some people do use it. If one person uses it, finds your site (or a clients) and buys something, then it makes the time spent on meta tags worth it. But if you ignore meta tags, you may never know who you won’t reach.
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