Weight on Meta Tag Relevancy to Content

[DSL Guy]

How much weight does a search engine like Google or Yahoo or MSN put on Meta Tag Relevancy to page content? Does that affect how you come up in search results very much?

[robinev]

Nobody who doesn't work for the search engine in question knows. The algorithms they use for their spiders and indexers are tightly held proprietary secrets. They also frequently tweak the code they use.

But there are folks who spend a lot of time trying to figure it out. The consensus among them is that the SEs that you mentioned deeply discount the meta keyword tag or (in Google's case) ignore it completely.

Unlike Google and the new MSN (beta version), the meta description is displayed by Yahoo in many of their results. That leads many to conclude that description is given high weight by Yahoo (but only Yahoo).

My conclusions, having read many guesses, is that there is no harm in using well-constructed and relevant keyword and description meta tags. But on-page content and link text is far, far more important.

Since Google is thought to ignore keyword meta tags the issue of relevancy doesn't arise in their case. Many suspect that Google (at least any maybe others as well) is applying some kind of relevancy test to links. How that might work is so deeply hidden that it's a difficult to figure out what they're doing. Maybe they penalize sites that use irrelevant keywords. Maybe. It's more likely that they discount inbound links judged to be irrelevant, but even that isn't certain. The best bet seems to be to use only relevant keywords and encourage links from sites that likely share some portion of the same audience.

[motorwatchercounter]

I agree with Robinev,

The major search engines are now getting a lot more clever and secretive with the way they use their searches. It has not been uncommon to be high in the rankings one week and down the next. I also believe that Google look at how relative links are. I also think that they use the information from direct URL serches using Google and feedback if you allow them to use the "spy on you and feedback" part of the Google toobar. They call it page rankings. This, in theory means that it is difficult to get high rankings without being popular.

Some of you may say that they type in key words and show as number one. If you have obscure words (or even misspelt ones) you can make the top 10 if people type in those words or mis-spell so if you had nicrosoft in your keywords and body text you may get more searches than if you had spelt it correctly.