{"id":100134,"date":"2010-05-06T08:14:32","date_gmt":"2010-05-06T00:14:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seo-hacker.com\/?p=134"},"modified":"2021-05-11T06:30:30","modified_gmt":"2021-05-11T06:30:30","slug":"what-search-engine-crawlers-do-with-your-meta-tags","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seo-hacker.com\/what-search-engine-crawlers-do-with-your-meta-tags\/","title":{"rendered":"What Search Engine Crawlers do with your Meta Tags"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Meta<\/a>We all know that our meta tags get crawled and indexed due to the fact that it comes out on the snippets and several other reasons. But we\u2019ve also heard that it doesn\u2019t have any weight on page rankings. So how does it work? How does a search engine treat the meta tags in your webpage? What does search engines do with your meta tags?<\/p>\n

Meta tags are codes in your website\u2019s <head> portion. They are invisible to the users and\u00a0are by far, the only legal way to have unseen keywords <\/a>in your website. Don\u2019t you ever wonder what search engines do with your meta tags since we know that it doesn\u2019t affect page ranking anymore? I know I do. So I read some articles about it and found out from Search Engine Land<\/a> what exactly your meta tags is being used for by the search engine crawlers.<\/p>\n

There are three things that a search engine crawler does with your meta tags:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

1. Indexing:<\/strong> When a search engine crawls your page, it replicates a copy of your HTML code and stores it in its database. This is called indexing.\u00a0All your meta keywords are indexed by Google\u00a0\u2013 it is aware of your meta keywords and has stored it up. Even so, it doesn\u2019t mean it uses it in any way else. It just stores it up.<\/p>\n

2. Retrieval:<\/strong> Also termed\u00a0 by information research professionals as \u201cRecall\u201d,<\/a> is how a search engine reacts to the people surfing the web and looking for something.\u00a0 The search engine retrieves\u00a0what it has indexed about your website and will compare it with the search query of the user. It matches if the documents it has indexed are relevant with the search query the user has initiated. While it does look at the sites it has indexed, it does not necessarily mean that it will go through the indexed document completely\u00a0\u2013 meaning that it will not necessarily go through the meta keywords for retrieval and matching with the search query. I know Google doesn\u2019t, although I\u2019ve read that Yahoo does.<\/p>\n

3. Ranking:<\/strong> Now this is where it goes down to business. Ranking is also termed as \u201cPrecision\u201d<\/a> because it is all about putting the best, and most accurate and relevant stuff up top. The ranking algorithm between search engines vary. Some say that for Yahoo, meta keywords still hold water albeit very shallowly so. For Google, I\u2019ve heard that meta tags hold no weight at all in their ranking algorithm. Any way you put it, meta tags\u00a0can do\u00a0very little to none\u00a0with your page rankings.<\/p>\n

Now that we have that established, what exact uses does meta tags have in your website? What does SEO experts use meta tags for? I\u2019ll be talking about this in my next entry so watch out for it!<\/p>\n

Tips for keeps:<\/strong> Don\u2019t focus too much on your meta tags. Yes it does help, but it helps minimally. You should focus on SEO factors with more weight<\/a> in relation to your site\u2019s page ranking.<\/p>\n

\n

This entry is part of the SEO Hacker School<\/a> series: Using Meta Tags for SEO<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Next Lesson:<\/strong> How Meta Tags should be used for SEO<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We all know that our meta tags get crawled and indexed due to the fact that it comes out on the snippets and several other reasons. But we\u2019ve also heard that it doesn\u2019t have any weight on page rankings. So how does it work? How does a search engine treat the meta tags in your webpage? What does search engines do with your meta tags?<\/p>\n

Meta tags are codes in your website\u2019s portion. They are invisible to the users and are by far, the only legal way to have unseen keywords in your website. Don\u2019t you ever wonder what search engines do with your meta tags since we know that it doesn\u2019t affect page ranking anymore? I know I do. So I read some articles about it and found out from Search Engine Land what exactly your meta tags is being used for by the search engine crawlers.<\/p>\n

There are three things that a search engine crawler does with your meta tags:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wl_entities_gutenberg":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[100020],"tags":[100323,100440,100441,100444,100491,100566,100600,101000,101394],"wl_entity_type":[102583],"class_list":["post-100134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meta-tags-seo-school","tag-indexing","tag-meta-description","tag-meta-keywords","tag-meta-tags","tag-page-ranking","tag-retrieval","tag-search-engine-crawlers","tag-what-search-engine","tag-what-search-engines-do","wl_entity_type-article"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat search engine crawlers do with your meta tags<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"We all know that our meta tags get crawled and indexed due to the fact that it comes out on the snippets and several other reasons. 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