Questions tagged [meta-tags]

Meta tags convey information about a webpage, such as its description or its keywords, in a way that a computer program can understand. They can be specified with the <meta> element and its 'name' and 'content' attributes.

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13 votes
3 answers
7k views

Can microdata be implemented in meta tags?

Please consider the following code marked up with attributes to provide microdata: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Micro data test - Normal version</title&...
user avatar
7 votes
2 answers
3k views

How can I replace my site's domain name on search engines with its business name?

I'm building a site and I've noticed that when I search my site's name on Google, unlike other sites my website's URL is displayed instead of the business title. Can somebody please help me figure ...
CoolMAn's user avatar
  • 171
6 votes
3 answers
1k views

Should search engine validation meta tags be removed following validation?

Should validation meta tags for search engines be left on the site following validation? For example, should I leave my msvalidate meta tag after I've validated the site.
user389823's user avatar
5 votes
1 answer
502 views

Should paginated content have unique meta tags?

I have a category page that leads to an additional 100 pages. For example: www.example.com/category <- this is my category page www.example.com/category-2.html <- this is paginated content ...
Dominic Reigns's user avatar
2 votes
2 answers
6k views

Why won't Google use my meta description? [duplicate]

I have an issue with my website: Google isn’t using my meta description, instead it’s using the content of the web page and I’m really confused. Reason I’m confused is because I have checked and I ...
Tosin Onikute's user avatar
24 votes
3 answers
12k views

Order of HTML meta tags

A SEO company suggested we change the order of our HTML meta tags so that <title> and <meta name="description"> are the first two. They say this is to ensure search engines can utilize ...
Kaivosukeltaja's user avatar
21 votes
2 answers
554 views

Which meta tags are not worth the effort?

After reading this question about meta keywords, I've been wondering : of all meta tags, which ones are really worth the effort ? I know that the description is used in google search results, and the ...
Wookai's user avatar
  • 1,607
16 votes
3 answers
9k views

Is it possible to stop Chrome and other browsers from pre-fetching/rendering my site?

I know you can guide Chrome to prefetch links you think users are likely to click on your site, but can you also do the inverse? Can you tell Chrome (or really any browser) not to prefetch and ...
Ian C.'s user avatar
  • 263
14 votes
3 answers
36k views

What is the solution for "Submitted URL not selected as canonical" in Google Search Console beta?

Google's new webmaster tools has a section 'Index coverage'>'Excluded'>'Submitted URL not selected as canonical'. I am getting 3 internal links in the section "Submitted URL not selected as ...
Saumya's user avatar
  • 141
4 votes
1 answer
2k views

Meta Description has HTML entities, will Google show the real character or the entity code in SERP?

Will Google's SERP show the ampersand (&) or the ampersand HTML entity &amp; in its snippet? Here is my description meta tag: <meta content="Questions &amp; Answers" name="description"/...
Kevin's user avatar
  • 41
3 votes
1 answer
2k views

Duplicate meta title and description displayed in Google Webmaster Tools [duplicate]

In Google Webmaster Tools under Search Appearance --> HTML Improvements it's showing: Duplicate Meta Titles - 166 Duplicate Meta Descriptions - 275 For example: Duplicate title tags Offer prices ...
mahitha mannar's user avatar
2 votes
2 answers
286 views

robots meta not blocking indexing

We have a staging version of our website to test changes on at trailheadpaddleshack.ca/staging1. This never appeared in search before. Recently the staging site has appeared on Google and is affecting ...
Cleo Poulin's user avatar
24 votes
8 answers
34k views

Twitter card [summary_large_image] not displaying image

I have set up a series of Twitter cards for my website. The type of twitter card is [summary_large_image]. The meta-information included in the <head> of my webpage is: <meta name="twitter:...
Rounin's user avatar
  • 2,335
16 votes
2 answers
6k views

Indexing for Google scholar, which tags to use?

In the "Inclusion Guidelines for Webmasters" for Google Scholar is written under Indexing Guidelines: Google Scholar supports Highwire Press tags (e.g., citation_title), Eprints tags (e.g., eprints....
Peter Smit's user avatar
12 votes
2 answers
3k views

Where are the complete set of Highwire Press metatags defined?

In the Google Scholar Inclusion Guidelines for Webmasters , it is suggested that one use the tags defined by "Highwire Press". Example: <meta name="citation_title" content="Article Title"> ...
Free Radical's user avatar
11 votes
3 answers
11k views

http-equiv=content-language alternative - the way of specifying document language

Lots of web sites uses following meta tag to specify the default language of the document: <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="es-ES"> When I go to W3C site and read about HTML ...
tugberk's user avatar
  • 787
8 votes
1 answer
20k views

Is "article:tag" meta tag necessary?

I just changed my Wordpress theme and I can't find <meta property="article:tag" content=" " /> in my posts and pages metadata. Are they really necessary? If they are how do I add them back?
Abhishek Macwan's user avatar
8 votes
2 answers
1k views

What are the pros and cons of using Dublin Core meta tags?

This is an open question on why, how, or when to use or not use Dublin Core meta tags. For example, <meta name="DC.title" content="Title of my Webpage" />. Should this be used in addition to ...
Joe Fletcher's user avatar
7 votes
5 answers
646 views

Are Meta Keywords Obsolete? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: Are meta keywords worth the effort? Creating a website for a BraodBand Company, and not too sure whether or not to go ahead and fill in the meta keywords? Are they still ...
user avatar
7 votes
3 answers
9k views

Can a website use multiple meta keyword tags?

Are these two equivalent? <meta name="keywords" content="first" /> <meta name="keywords" content="second, third" /> and <meta name="keywords" content="first, second, third" /> I ...
Jakub Arnold's user avatar
7 votes
3 answers
12k views

Which is good to target, singular or plural keyword?

Which keyword is better for targeting and on-page optimization, singular or plural? Like "baseball bat" or "baseball bats"?
Anshuman Chandel's user avatar
7 votes
2 answers
3k views

Website metadata SEO: Schema.org, Open Graph, Dublin Core and standard meta vs. duplicate meta?

There are a lot of schemas out there. Which should I use for my website SEO? Which are useless or may even be harmful? I will explain my question by the description tag: Schema.org: This is Google's ...
Blackbam's user avatar
  • 215
6 votes
1 answer
747 views

What is difference between robots.txt, sitemap, robots meta tag, robots header tag?

So I am trying to learn SEO and I am honestly confused and have following 8 questions. Do I tell a bot not to visit a certain link through X-Robots-Tag or through robot meta tag or robots.txt? Is it ...
Quillion's user avatar
  • 185
4 votes
1 answer
227 views

Are there only 12 directives for <meta name="robots" />?

As far as I can tell, in 2017, the <meta name="robots" content="index, follow"> accepts the following directives in the content attribute: index follow all (equivalent to content="index, follow"...
Rounin's user avatar
  • 2,335
4 votes
2 answers
3k views

Does rel="next" have to be in the HEAD?

I'm trying to improve SEO on a platform I'm working with, and was advised to add rel="next" and rel="prev" links to my pages to make it clearer to google which URLS are paginated. ...
Zachary Craig's user avatar
4 votes
2 answers
2k views

Is the meta name="author" tag actually good for SEO?

I noticed that every time I search on google for one of my pages, the sentence "[my name] blog" is added to the title results on Google when the title is not very long: I don't think that ...
Steve's user avatar
  • 317
3 votes
3 answers
3k views

How can I provide star rating metadata to search engines?

Some search engines (including Google and Bing) display a star rating for things like movies and downloads on sites such as IMDB and cnet. How can I configure my site to provide this data?
Gelatin's user avatar
  • 518
3 votes
1 answer
5k views

How to update the date on Google search results?

For a blog entry, I have this meta tags: <meta property="article:published_time" content="2015-09-07T21:54:43+00:00" /> <meta property="article:modified_time" content="2015-11-13T13:28:21+00:...
IvanRF's user avatar
  • 251
3 votes
3 answers
456 views

Usage of meta tag "generator"

Is the meta tag "generator" still relevant in today's web? Has it every had any use? <meta name="Generator" content="Drupal 7 (http://drupal.org)" />
Bart's user avatar
  • 248
3 votes
3 answers
2k views

Is leaving meta description tag empty beneficial?

Recently I have been searching for different things in google search engine, bower save flag manage bower cache The first results for these two different queries were same page https://bower....
user's user avatar
  • 139
2 votes
1 answer
219 views

Deleting many pages SEO check

I need to delete many pages (recipes) on my website because the recipes were made with products that don't exist any more. Links to those pages are all over social media so I can't just use a 410 ...
WendiT's user avatar
  • 403
2 votes
2 answers
1k views

Adding Google star Rating to the search Result

I need to add star rating to my site for showing the star image rating in search results. I did a search on the internet and read a few articles on it. It is basically Microformats and the related ...
Gourav Jude's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
212 views

Can noindex tags on several pages affect the overall SEO or ranking on Google?

Some SEO Gurus assured me that noindex attributes are good to devalue the unimportant pages. When I asked in the moz Q and A, they're quite sure that having noindex on the bulk of the articles on ...
Ankit raghu.'s user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
1k views

Meta keywords single words or phrase?

It is acceptable or recommended to only use 1 keyword per delimiter? Or can we use a phrase? For example: car, Audi, Ferrari, Lamborgini vs Audi Car, Ferrari Car, Lamborgini Car What is ...
Tech4Wilco's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
114 views

Correctly handling multi language URL's in sitemaps

I have an English page: https://www.example.com/content/article-1 This page is also avaliable in other languages at the URLs: https://www.example.com/de/content/article-1 https://www.example.com/zh-...
Tom Gullen's user avatar
  • 2,390
2 votes
2 answers
6k views

Which tags does Google use for displaying titles and descriptions in the search results?

I have a few questions about elements, and which elements Google uses to display our websites. For instance, does Google use the regular title element to display the titles of our website, or the meta-...
jessica's user avatar
  • 161
2 votes
1 answer
175 views

What is a difference in the order of "follow" and "index" in a robots meta tag?

What is the difference between <meta name="robots" content="follow, index"> and <meta name="robots" content="index, follow"> Would either create ...
Sanjay's user avatar
  • 21
2 votes
2 answers
168 views

hreflang tag for different design and different site?

We are going to extend our business to a different language and brand (English, abc.com) rather than our local one (German, bcd.com). Whilst the content for both focuses on same subject, the design ...
Mehmet Karcı's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
2k views

How can I use dual language metadata?

I have an online newspaper website. The content is fully in the Bangla language. The language of the website is Bangla but visitors are searching in search engines (Google, Yahoo & Bing) in ...
Mazharul Haq SEO's user avatar
1 vote
2 answers
2k views

Does the meta description affect page ranking on Google?

According to the following site http://dailyseotip.com/meta-description-tags-and-ctr-the-new-way-that-meta-tags-affect-rankings/1448/ We’ve known for years that Google doesn’t consider meta ...
Tom's user avatar
  • 193
1 vote
1 answer
2k views

How do you share a non-canonical URL on Facebook?

The company I work for has 5 domain names for 5 different markets within the country. Those domains have their own branded sites and share content between them. We place canonicals on each piece of ...
Christian's user avatar
  • 233
1 vote
1 answer
1k views

Google is not picking up meta description approximately 50 percent of the time on our website

We have a valid description meta tag on our website. We recently updated it. Temporarily we included a character (plus symbol) that may have been invalid. Since including this character, google would ...
MrVimes's user avatar
  • 123
1 vote
2 answers
1k views

difference between `<meta name="robots" content="nofollow" />` and `rel="nofollow"`

Is the meta tag <meta name="robots" content="nofollow" /> The same as rel="nofollow" in a link (apart from the fact the the meta tag would be page wide rather than on a per link basis) Or ...
sam's user avatar
  • 4,627
1 vote
1 answer
100 views

Can Open Graph properties be effectively used on tags other than meta/link?

meta and link elements sometimes create a sort of redundancy in the markup. For example, there is already a title element but in order to declare an og:title property one would have to add a separate ...
lucian's user avatar
  • 715
0 votes
1 answer
128 views

Writing meta description for listings pages

As per my research, they say either have unique meta description tags for each page or don't have them at all. I was okay not having them but the snippet google is showing in search results is really ...
Sandesh Yadav's user avatar
0 votes
4 answers
1k views

Getting indexed after removing meta noindex, Google

My question is, will my pages be indexed now in Google if they had <meta name="robots" content="noindex" /> in the past, since they were created? Of course, now they are <meta name="robots" ...
user avatar
0 votes
2 answers
117 views

Does loading metas from database affect my website SEO?

I am developing a website which is fully dynamic. If I load metas and other information of the website from database, will it affect my website's SEO?
AngularAngularAngular's user avatar