Meta tags and how to use them: Part 2
This tutorial continues on from Meta
tag Tutorial: Part 1 and shows some of the less well known
but often more interesting tags.
<meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet">
You know all those extra features like caching & excerpts Google
has in its search? Now you can actually control them!
- nosnippet - From Google help: "A snippet is a text
excerpt from the returned result page that has all query terms
bolded. The excerpt allows users to see the context in which
search terms appear on a web page, before clicking on the
result. Users are more likely to click on a search result if it
has a corresponding snippet." This value of NOSNIPPET removes
the text snippet.
- noarchive - From Google help: "Google keeps the text
of the many documents it crawls available in a cache. This
allows an archived, or "cached", version of a web page to be
retrieved for your end users if the original page is ever
unavailable (due to temporary failure of the page's web server).
The cached page appears to users exactly as it looked when
Google last crawled it. The cached page also includes a message
(at the top of the page) to indicate that it's a cached version
of the page."
Notes: - Some of the
smart guys out there might think if they use the NOSNIPPET value
then they will have their meta description tag shown,
unfortunately, this is not the case.
- Also, if you wish to use multiple values you can stack them
using commas, e.g: <meta name="GOOGLEBOT"
content="nosnippet,noarchive">
- You can also include the standards robots tags (below) so
that you have nosnippet,noarchive,nofollow.
Finally, remember Google states that this tag is for
restricting access to content, thus a tag like the
following is both foolish and unprofessional: <meta
name="GOOGLEBOT" content="index,follow">
<meta http-equiv="cache-control"
content="no-cache">
Possible values here are: - Public - Page may be
cached in public shared caches
- Private - Page
may only be cached in private cache
- no-Cache -
Page may not be cached
- no-Store - Page may be
cached but not archived
<meta name="copyright" content="© 2005 Benjamin
Wigoder">
A very self-explanatory tag, who the copyright of the page
belongs to (webmaster? ceo? company?)
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="Fri, 13 May 2006
22:30:07 GMT">
When the page content expires and search engines should either
delete the page or revisit it. Day of week must be first 3
english letters, time must be in 24 hour format with seconds and
it must be GMT.
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache">
Similar to the cache control but is more compatible with older
http formats. It indicates no cache information should be used
and all data requests should be forwarded to the origin server.
<meta http-equiv="refresh"
content="5;URL=http://www.benwiggy.com">
A very useful tag - so much more compatible and reliable than
Javascript redirects. The first number is in seconds and then
you type the URL (can be relative: e.g. page2.html instead of
http://www...)
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
The Googlebot tag was based on this one, possible values are:
- all - The default, the same as
index,follow.
- noindex - Do not index the
page.
- index - Index the page.
- follow - Follow all links from the page.
- nofollow - Don't follow any links from the page.
- none - Robots can ignore the page (same as
noindex,nofollow).
Robots values can be stacked using
commas, e.g: <meta name="robots"
content="index,nofollow">
<meta name="publisher" content="Benjamin
Wigoder">
Not a very well known tag, often matches the value of the author
and copyright holder, but not always.
<meta http-equiv="Reply-to"
CONTENT="fakeemailad@ssspamthis.com">
I really do not advise this tag unless you like spam...
<meta name="creation_date"
CONTENT="03/06/2005">
The date on which the page was created.
<meta http-equiv="Window-target"
content="_top">
In the newest browsers this means no more Javascript to stop
other sites framing your pages - just insert this and your site
cannot be framed! Do NOT use on frame pages!
Conclusion
Well, there you have it, almost every meta tag in existance in
one place! I excluded some because they were too specific (like
some Microsoft ones...) If you missed it, the first Meta
tag tutorial part is available on my site and features the
more important and more common meta tags. Remember, metas are
not dead - just under-estimated!