Jika ada artkel yang membahas tentang SEO, biasanya disitu pasti dibahas tentang meta tag, seperti meta keyword, meta keyword, dan meta description. Dulu meta tag boleh saja dibilang sebagai faktor penting dalam SEO, tetapi sekarang bagi Google meta tag sudah tidak penting lagi. Silahkan baca di blog Webmaster Google di sini.
Q: Does Google ever use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking?
A: In a word, no. Google does sell a Google Search Appliance, and that product has
the ability to match meta tags, which could include the keywords meta tag. But that’s an enterprise search appliance that is completely separate from our main web search. Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.
Q: Why doesn’t Google use the keywords meta tag?
A: About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.
Q: Does this mean that Google ignores all meta tags?
A: No, Google does support several other meta tags. This
meta tags page documents more info on several meta tags that we do use. For example, we do sometimes use the “description” meta tag as the text for our search results snippets, as this screenshot shows:
Google lebih mempunyai algoritma sendiri yang lebih baik dalam mengenali content suatu website daripada menganalisa meta tag. Meskipun meta tag tidak dianggap penitng oleh Google, tetapi Google masih menggunakan meta description untuk memberikan keterangan untuk sutau web site di search result. Contohnya bisa dilihat ketika melakukan searching di Google, maka akan muncul deskripsi di bawah judul website di search result, meskipun Google tidak selalau mengambil deskripsi tersebut dari search result.
Jadi yang gemar melakukan spamming di meta keyword dan description, lebih baik berusaha mengoptimalkan content agar relevan dengan topik website.
