Meta tags 112
Yahoo! Senior Director of Search states that "...What changed with Yahoo's ranking algorithms is that while we still
index the meta keyword tag, the ranking importance given to meta keyword tags receives the lowest ranking signal
in our system.... it will actually have less effect than introducing those same words in the body of the document, or
any other section."[7]The description attribute
Unlike the keywords attribute, the description attribute is supported by most major search engines, like
Yahoo! and Bing, while Google will fall back on this tag when information about the page itself is requested (e.g.
using the related: query) keywords are very important in description to increase the ranking of site in search
engine. The description attribute provides a concise explanation of a Web page's content. This allows the Web
page authors to give a more meaningful description for listings than might be displayed if the search engine was
unable to automatically create its own description based on the page content. The description is often, but not
always, displayed on search engine results pages, so it can affect click-through rates. Industry commentators have
suggested that major search engines also consider keywords located in the description attribute when ranking
pages.[8] W3C doesn't specify the size of this description meta tag, but almost all search engines recommend it to be
shorter than 155 characters of plain text.The language attribute
The language attribute tells search engines what natural language the website is written in (e.g. English, Spanish
or French), as opposed to the coding language (e.g. HTML). It is normally an IETF language tag for the language
name. It is of most use when a website is written in multiple languages and can be included on each page to tell
search engines in which language a particular page is written.[9]The robots attribute
The robots attribute, supported by several major search engines,[10] controls whether search engine spiders are
allowed to index a page, or not, and whether they should follow links from a page, or not. The attribute can contain
one or more comma-separate values. The noindex value prevents a page from being indexed, and nofollow
prevents links from being crawled. Other values recognized by one or more search engines can influence how the
engine indexes pages, and how those pages appear on the search results. These include noarchive, which instructs
a search engine not to store an archived copy of the page, and nosnippet, which asks that the search engine not
include a snippet from the page along with the page's listing in search results.[11]
Meta tags are not the best option to prevent search engines from indexing content of a website. A more reliable and
efficient method is the use of the robots.txt file (robots exclusion standard).Additional attributes for search engines
NOODP
The search engines Google, Yahoo! and MSN use in some cases the title and abstract of the Open Directory Project
(ODP) listing of a website for the title and/or description (also called snippet or abstract) in the search engine results
pages (SERP). To give webmasters the option to specify that the ODP content should not be used for listings of their
website, Microsoft introduced in May 2006 the new "NOODP" value for the "robots" element of the meta tags.[12]
Google followed in July 2006[13] and Yahoo! in October 2006.[14]
The syntax is the same for all search engines who support the tag.Webmasters can decide if they want to disallow the use of their ODP listing on a per search engine basis