Are Metatags Useful? Metatags and SEO
Saturday, August 2nd, 2008Have metatags totally outgrown they’re welcome? In the early days of SEO, metatags were part of the marketing goldrush. But that was back in the days when you could actually fool a search engine spider with ridiculous amounts of keyword jamming or adding a long list of keyphrases at the bottom of a page. Amazing to think that these tactics ever worked. Metatags worked in a similar fashion: instead of creating a list of links, you could “hide” these words within metatags.
This practice worked for a time – even after keyword jamming got a site instantly banned. But metatags were used and abused much like keyphrases in content. Website owners thought they were being sly by adding unrelated keywords in metatags. Metatag spam became popular with some site owners. Some even added adult-themed tags that might be flagged if they were contained in on-page content. These practices basically ruined metatags for everybody because metatags are no longer an effective SEO tool.














