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• <meta name=”description” content=”…”>

Almost the same as the meta keyword tag, meta description tag is where crawlers refer to get a description of a page and then displayed it on search engine result pages (SERP). People who see your link will determine if it is your site they are looking for and hopefully drop a visit if it is.

Look at my source code screen shot above, the text inside <meta name=”description” content=”…> goes as a description below the title when my blog appear on SERP like below. Sometimes, search engines don’t follow the tag but rather extracting a few sentences from the content to put as a description. But again, I want to maximize its use for search engines which does.

How long is an ideal length of a meta description tag? I ran an analysis to my blog and the result said that my description is acceptable and search engine friendly. It contains 123 characters while the recommended maximum characters are 150. Does it mean I can’t go over 150? Of course I can, but I’m not going to risk it being considered spamming the search engine. I’ll stick with the proper length .

• <meta name=”robots” content=”…”>

This meta tag controls which pages you’d like the crawlers to index and display the results on search engine result pages (SERP) or to follow links. Now you may be asking, “Why wouldn’t I want as many pages as possible to appear in SERP?”

The answer relates to Google’s policy of duplicate content. Supposed you have an article with the title “Driving Traffic to Your Blog” under the category “Tips and Recommendations”, then the URL “www.yourblog.com/driving-traffic-to-your-blog/” and “www.yourblog.com/tips-and-recommendations/driving-traffic-to-your-blog/” will point to the same location, right? We know that it’s the same one article, but robots see that as two articles having exact content. For that reason, I’d prefer using the meta robots tag <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>. Here’s what’ll Google do about dupes from Google’s blog:

….that if your site has articles in “regular” and “printer” versions and neither set is blocked in robots.txt or via a noindex meta tag, we’ll choose one version to list. In the rare cases in which we perceive that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. However, we prefer to focus on filtering rather than ranking adjustments … so in the vast majority of cases, the worst thing that’ll befall webmasters is to see the “less desired” version of a page shown in our index.

OK, now about the following links thing I mentioned earlier. Following links could mean flowing some PageRank (PR) juice to any links on that page. For example, HomeBiz Resource has a PR4. And on the sidebar or sometimes inside the posts, there are links leading to another blog/site (outbound links). These outbound links are like pipes pouring PR4 liquids to wherever the links link to. Well, I don’t mind sharing PR (I share them thru do-follow comments, blogrolls, posts, ads sections, “More Links” page), but I need to balance the incoming PR juice with the outgoing one to avoid a PR drop.

The contrast between incoming and outgoing links is only one of the factors taken account into addressing a PageRank for a site. For more info about PageRank itself, you’re invited to read “Google PageRank - Fact and Knowledge“

So you see on my “Featured Articles” and “Sitemap” section, I set the no-follow attribute to the page (you can do it from the WordPress’ Manage|Post admin menu, if you’re using WP).

The reason why I chose those two pages to be a non-following page is they contain mostly links to my own content. And if I let crawlers following links there, it’ll be a wasted PR leaks. But I don’t mind following links to useful articles or services including for your time to contribute comments !

If so, why don’t we see the meta robots no-follow and no-index tag in my source code? It’s because I’ve done it via WordPress’ admin panel or using the All in One SEO Pack WordPress plugin by uberdose. This plug-in offers the same functionality without the troublesome of implementing the tags in every place. If you found that some of the content has already been crawled, you can use the Google url removal tool to remove them.

Update Feb 13 2008: Back to the codes screenshot, the meta robot tag contains the attribute noarchive. What in the world does it mean? Well, do you notice that sometimes when you do a search you see a “cached” link next to the URL of the listed search result? Those cache contains how the site was in the past. It may be yesterday, three days ago or even a week ago. I have a social network profile which snapshot of my blog isn’t updated. I think they took the snapshot from Google’s cache. I still haven’t figure out if I remove the cache, would it be forced to take a snapshot directly from my blog.

There are other reasons to add the noarchive attribute, like if you frequently update your site and you want the latest version of your site/blog is the one presented to visitors.

Update end—

Additionally, not all robots obey your <meta> tag. Malware bots looking for security holes and email harvester bots will ignore the command.

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