Other META Tags
There are many META tags which go unused in most websites today. Back in the 1990s search engine rankings often relied on the META tags of the webpage. By the early 2000s most search engines stopped recognising META tags as a way of getting search rankings. This was due to how easy it is to mislead customers by for example using keywords which have nothing to do with the website itself, just to drive traffic to them. These techniques are often used by spam sites to drive traffic to their website and present the user with endless advertisements. In this article I will be talking about META tags which aren’t very widely used.
Author
Example:
<meta name=”author” content=”Mathew Chapman” />
The author META tag simply tells the browser who the author of the document is. Usually the web developer who built the page.
Copyright
Example:
<meta name=”copyright” content=”© 2008 Company Name” />
The copyright META tag is used to simply tell the browser the copyright statement, usually the web site name.
Robots
Example:
<meta name=”robots” content=”all” />
The robots META tag tell the search engine spiders what they can do with the current page, weather to follow its links or to stay on that page. The default setting for this is “all” the settings below are all options of the robots META tag.
- all
- Allows all of the files to be indexed
- none
- Prevents any files been indexed and tells the spider not to follow any of the links
- index
- Allows the spider to index the page
- noindex
- Tells the spider not to index the page
- follow
- Tells the spider to follow the links on the page
- nofollow
- Stops the spider from following links on the page
http-equiv
Using http-equiv META tag is the equivalent as setting HTTP headers on the server side. HTTP headers are normally received from the server before the content is received, these headers tell the browser how to process the page. Using the http-equiv META tag allows you to change these settings when the content is shown. Examples below
Cache Control
Example:
<meta http-equiv=”cache-control” content=”no-cache,must-revalidate” />
Using the cache-control META tag above will tell the browser not to cache the page and to refresh it when trying to view it again. All the settings below can be used with the cache-control:no-cache META tag.
- no-transform
- Tells the browser that the proxy can not transform the data
- must-revalidate
- Tells the browser that the page must be revalidated
- proxy-revalidate
- Tells the proxy server that the page must be revalidated
- max-age=<seconds>
- Tells the browser that the page needs revalidating after the specified amount of seconds has passed. Note: replace <seconds> with actual seconds e.g. s-maxage=30
- s-maxage=<seconds>
- Tells the shared proxy server that the page needs revalidating after the specified amount of seconds has passed. Note: replace <seconds> with actual seconds e.g. s-maxage=30
Language
Example:
<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en,fr” />
The language META tag tells the search engine which language the current page is written in. This is of most help when you use several languages on your website. The content should be a 2 letter abbrieviation of the language, and seperated by a comma if using more than one language. The example above tells the search engine that the current page is in English and French.
Content-Type
Example:
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />
Setting the Content-Type META tag tells the browser what content style is being displayed and what format the content is in. Examples of Content-Type include ‘text/html’, ‘text/xml’, ‘text/javascript’, ‘text/css’.
Expires
Example:
<meta http-equiv=”expires” content=”Sat, 1 Jan 2000 11:30:30 GMT” />
Using the expires META tag will tell the browser that the page should be classed as expired after the provided date. Entering an illegal value such as “0″ will tell the browser that the expiry date is now. This can be used when dynamic content is on the page to tell the browser that the page needs to be refreshed.
Pragma
Example:
<meta http-equiv=”pragma” content=”no-cache” />
The pragma META tag tells the browser or spiders not to cache the page, and it should be revalidated when the page is viewed again. The following settings can all be used with the pragma META tag.
- public
- May be cached by public shared caches
- private
- May only be cached in a private caches
- no-cache
- May not be cached
- no-store
- May be cached but not archived.
Refresh
Example:
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”20;URL=http://www.positiongoldltd.com” />
Using the refresh META tag above will tell the browser to redirect the browser after 20 seconds to http://www.positiongoldltd.com. The content value should always have seconds and a URL even if the seconds is set to 0.
From an SEO point of view using the refresh META tag is a bad technique as search engine spiders wont follow the redirect. For example you could have great content which relates to a search term to bring in users and then redirect them to a totally different page / website. However most of the time search engines are aware of this bad practice and may well penalise the offending websites, which sometimes involves dropping ranks in the search results or sometimes even been dropped from the search engine altogether. So please be aware of that before you use the refresh META tag.
