Recently I had been doing interviews for SEO Experts and we invited some of the most experienced people in the country and one of my common questions to them was to explain the important ON-Page Optimization elements in a web page. Most of the people considered Meta Tags as one of the most important elements that Google considers for ranking a web page.

Meta tags are a great way for webmasters to provide search engines with information about their web pages. Meta tags can be used to provide information to all sorts of search engines but Google processes only the Meta tags they consider valuable and ignores the rest.

It is a common misconception among SEO’s in the industry that Google considers Meta Tags in their ranking. In reality Meta Tags have never been important for Google ranking technology. Google have never considered keyword meta tags in its search engine ranking. Description Meta Tag is used sometimes when the page is initially indexed.  Google displays description in the search result but even then it does not play any role in ranking.

Here I would like to suggest to you guys “Stop wasting your time on meta tags.” There are a lot more important ON-Page SEO elements; work on them and get your site better ranked.

There are many other Meta tags we don’t use commonly but they are extremely helpful.

Meta Tag robot is very important to give instructions to Google. Some of the common values it could have and Google understands are:

noindex - will tell Google not to include current page in Google index.

nofollow - will tell Google not to follow any link on the page.

nosnippet - will tell Google not to cache page and will not display snippet of page under title in search results.

noodp - If Google does not find reasonable title or description of the page it indexes, It tries finding this information from other open sources like Open Directory Project DMOZ. If you don’t want Google to pick this information from DMOZ, simply add this value.

noarchive - will tell Google not to display cache page link in search result.

unavailable_after: [date] – will tell Google to stop crawling and indexing the current page after specified date.

noimageindex - will tell Google not to display the page as referring page for the image in google search result.

Sometimes when the web page contains content of different language Google displays translation link in front of the result. If you wish to prevent that; set Meta tag google to notranslate.