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Specifying a Canonical URL The New Google Link Tag, Duplicate Content Issues (Solved)

Duplicate content on your own website, where different web addresses (“URLs”) on your site display identical content, can lead to problems in your website’s performance in the search engine. This article discusses one way to resolve this for the Google search engine.

Video Tutrioal Solve Duplicate Content

The Problem with Duplicate Content

I have discussed the problems associated with having different URLs show the same content, or what webmasters often call “duplicate content”, in my articles before.

In case it isn’t clear to you how this can come about, take the example of a site selling a product called “Widget A”. The site links to a product page showing details of widget A using the URL “http://www.example.com/widget-A/“. Like all sites with high usability, the webmaster also provides other ways in which the visitor can end up on that product page. For example, if the visitor uses the site’s “Help” function to look for a product with certain features, the site may show information about Widget A that fulfills the visitor’s criteria. The information page may use a different address, like “http://www.example.com/help.php?features=fix+kitchen+sink“. Both addresses show the exact same information, since they are talking about the same product.

Even if you don’t use scripts on your website, it’s still possible to end up with duplicate content problems. For example, the “index.html” page of a website or its directory is usually the same page displayed by a web server when the visitor accesses the site without specifying a filename. That is, “http://www.example.com/index.html” and “http://www.example.com/” are usually the same page, showing the same content. (For more information about this behaviour, and its ramifications, see “Should Your URLs Point to the Directory or the Index Page?”.)

When a page can be accessed with multiple web addresses, you run the risk of link dilution. I’ve mentioned this before in How to Create a Search Engine Friendly Website, so if you’re not familiar with the term, please check that article out for details. In general, link dilution causes the relevant page on your site to rank less in the search engine results than it should had it not occurred.

The New Canonical URL Link Tag

To help webmasters solve this problem, Google has declared that it will recognize a new HTML / XHTML tag, which, if you insert into your web page, will allow you to state which URL you want to be the “official”, or “canonical”, address for that particular content.

This tag needs to be inserted into the HEAD section of your web page. It has the following format:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/correct-page.html” />

Replace “http://www.example.com/correct-page.html” with your actual web address. Remember: the code has to go into the HEAD section of your web page where all the meta data are, and not into the BODY section where your content lives. If you use a WYSIWYG web editor (where WYSIWYG means “What You See Is What You Get”), change to the “Source” mode to locate the right section.

What the Canonical URL Link Tag Solves

The canonical URL link tag will cause Google to take the web address you put into the tag as the “official” or “correct” version of your web address. If you have two URLs that resolve to the same content, Google will use the one declared as canonical as the actual URL. This means the following:

  • In search engine results, it will display the canonical URL instead of all the variants it finds on your website.
  • You will avoid the link dilution problem mentioned earlier. Links from other sites that point to your content using all its myriad URLs will be regarded as pointing to your canonical URL. That is to say, your page rank from all the diverse URLs will flow correctly to the page it’s supposed to be attached to.

Limitations of the Canonical URL Tag

There are some limitations to what the new link tag can do.

  • The information about the canonical URL does not work across different domain names. However, it works across sub-domain names.For example, if you have a URL like “a.com/something” that is identical with “b.com/something-else“, Google will not take your canonical url link tag on b.com to apply to a.com.However, if you have URLs on multiple subdomains on your domain that show the same content, like “www.example.com/xyz.html”, “my.example.com/whatever.html” and “example.com/index.html” all showing the same page, putting a canonical link tag will cause Google to accept the URL you put in your link tag as the real URL.Update: Google now accepts cross-domain canonical tags. That is, this limitation no longer exists.
  • The tag is currently only recognized by Google. As such, you should still continue to find ways of reducing multiple URLs that lead to the same content on your website.Update: some of the other search engines have said that they will support the canonical tag as well, although they may not necessarily give it the same weightage as Google. Nor will they necessarily support its use across different domains (see above point).

Solving the Problem of Duplicate Content

It’s probably too early to say whether this will become the definitive method that helps webmasters solve the pesky duplicate contentproblemthat plagues many sites. (The tag was only officially announced by Google on 12 February 2009.)

I personally think it is an ingenious solution, and it puts the power of how to resolve the issues into the hands of the webmasters themselves, rather than letting the search engine, which usually does not have enough information, try to figure out the correct URL. Hopefully, the other search engines will also recognize this tag, making this a problem of the past.

How To Search phrase Solidity in Search Website Ranking

Some years ago, back when Alta Vista was still the search engine of choice, I tried to find one of thefreecountry.com’s most famous pages, The Free C / C++ Compilers page, on Alta Vista using the search term “+free +c++ +compilers”. I must have scanned at least 20 pages of the search results, but could not find that page listed anywhere.

Video Tutrioal Search phrase Solidity in Search Website Ranking

I went back and looked at my page again, and realised that in the interest of brevity, the phrase “C++ compiler” occurred on the page only once. I had listed every compiler on the page without the words “C++ compiler”. For example, the entry for “Borland C++ Compiler” was simply listed as “Borland”. While this kept my page size down, it did not help the search engine realize that my page was about C++ compilers. I did a simple change to the page so that every compiler was listed under its full name (with the “C++ compiler” bit), and resubmitted the page to Alta Vista.

After nearly a month, I checked Alta Vista again, using the same search terms. The page was now listed on the first page of the search results. Incredible!

(I don’t know if it’s still on the first page though, these positions change everytime someone submits a site.)

Update: Note that this article was written in the early days of the Internet (circa 2000), and refers to the old Alta Vista search engine. It is probably not very relevant for the modern search engines like Google or even the Alta Vista of the modern day. For up-to-date hints on making your website search engine friendly, please see the articles How to Create a Search Engine Friendly Website and Why Is My Site Not Ranking in the Search Engines? instead.

Update (17 December 2010): It looks like AltaVista is about to be closed by Yahoo!, its current owners.

What is Keyword Density?

One of the simplest ways to improve your site’s placement in the search engine results is to work on the keyword density on your page, which was what I did.

For my purpose here, I will refer to a “keyword” as a word that the user searches for when using the search engine. Generally speaking, keyword density is the ratio of the word that is being searched for (the keyword) against the total number of words appearing on your web page. If your keyword occurs only (say) once in a page of one thousand words, it has a lower keyword density than a keyword that occurs (say) four times in a page of similar length.

If a particular keyword has a higher density on your web page, then the likelihood of your page obtaining a better search engine ranking increases. Note that not all search engines bother with keyword density and indeed even those that do have their own algorithm for computing the density of a keyword. However, the principles described in this article is general enough to help your page improve its ranking in the engines that take keyword density into account.

How to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

How do you improve your keyword density?

Video Tutrioal

Video Tutrioal 5 Ways to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

  1. When planning a page, think about which search terms a user is likely to use when searching for the information your site provides. For example, a visitor who is looking for information on “Search Engine Ranking” may search for things like “search engine positioning”, “search engine ranking”, “search engine placement”, “keyword density”, “top ranking”, and the like.
  2. After you have collected your list of keywords, do NOT simply dump those keywords into a senseless list on your web page. I’ve seen some websites do this in an attempt to influence search engine listings. This may not work with all search engines. Some of the engines attempt to be smart when processing keywords and if it sees keywords occurring together in a senseless sequence, it may penalise your website.
  3. Instead, try to form sentences that use those keywords. If you are a good writer, you may have to kill some of those good habits you previously used in writing documents: for example, many good writers have an aversion to repeating a particular word too often, choosing instead to use alternative terms that mean the same thing. This makes for a more pleasant reading, but it will not help you get your site listed with a top rank in search engine results for that particular keyword.For instance, if you want your page to have a high ranking when someone searches for the phrase “search engine ranking”, keep repeating the phrase “search engine ranking” in your document instead of substituting with pronouns like “it” and the like. Do likewise for the other keywords that you want a high density on the page. You’ll of course have to use your discretion with this, or your page will be unpleasant to read.You can see an example of how this is done by examining this article itself, and see how often I have repeated keywords and phrases like “keyword”, “keyword density”, “search engine ranking” and “search engine positioning”.
  4. In days of old, some people tried the trick of having a very short page for a particular keyword. For example, the page may only have the following one sentence: “Keyword density is important in search engine ranking.” Since there were so few words on the page, the page was actually easy to draft and the keywords “keyword density” and “search engine ranking” have a very high density on that page.This method is not very useful nowadays. For example, at the time I wrote this, it no longer appears to work with Alta Vista, which seems to rank pages that are bigger than 4K more favourably.

Conclusion

When I increased the keyword density of certain keywords on one of my pages on thefreecountry.com, my page ranking took a big leap upwards. Improving the density of keywords on your pages may also do the same for your site’s search engine position.

How to Use Meta Meta tags In Look for Website Promotion

If you view the HTML sources for the web pages on the thesitewizard.com, you would have noticed that they all contain META tags. META tags influence the way some search engines list and index web pages.

There are at least three META tags that you will want to use to make sure your page is search engine ready.

What are Meta tags good for?

For search engines that support them, META tags are used in at least three ways:

  1. They are used to describe your site in the search results. For example, if you do not have a META Description tag for your page, some search engines will simply grab the first few lines of your page to serve as the description of your site. This description is more important than you may think. If you were searching for “nosuchwordasthis”, which of the following two items listed would you be more likely to click?
    • Nosuchwordasthis.com: Ridiculous and Impossible Words
      Home About Example.com Contact Us Links Download FAQ
    • Nosuchwordasthis.com: Ridiculous and Impossible Words
      Some of the incredible words that netizens have come up with this year, along with their supposed meanings.

    The first item above had a snippet from what appears to be its top menu in the lines below the website title. The second item has a description which tells the person searching exactly what the site is all about.

    If you do not put a description tag, what appears in the listing would be likely to be whatever first appears on your page, usually the alt text of some graphic or banner or perhaps your top menu.

  2. There are search engines which also look for a META Robots tag to determine how they index your site. For example, if Google does not encounter such a tag, it will assume that it can index and follow the links on the page. If you want some other behaviour from Google, you will have to use a META tag to specify it.
  3. In the old days, they were used to determine which keywords your page will be listed under. So if you want your page to be listed in a search engine when the user searches for the term “nosuchwordasthis”, the latter should be present in your META Keywords tag as well as in your document. I’m not sure however if any search engine still uses this tag today.

There are other META tags, which individual search engines recognize. However, the tags listed here are the main tags relevant to most search engines.

How to Use the META Description Tag

A META Description tag, for those of you who write your web pages using raw HTML code, looks like the following:

<meta name=”description” content=”put your page description here” />

Give a brief description of your page in this tag. Bear in mind that this description (or part of it) will be displayed in the search engine results so try to make sure you phrase it in such a way that the person searching can tell at a glance that he’s found the correct page for his search. Minimize irrelevancies and put the essentials near the beginning of the description so that if the search engine only accepts the initial (say) 150 characters, the essential parts of your description will still be displayed.

Not all search engines use this tag. For example, Google normally only displays the text surrounding the matching keyword that the searcher used.

How to Use the META Robots Tag

Although this Meta tag is seldom mentioned in search engine promotion guides, it is important if you want certain search engines to crawl through your website using the links on the page you submit. Since adding it involves little additional effort, you might as well do it while you add the other tags.

In general, you will add the following line to your web page if you want the search engine to index your page and follow the links on it.

<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow” />

In cases where you do not want it to index your page simply use “noindex” instead of “index”. Likewise if you don’t want the engine to crawl through the links on your page, use “nofollow” instead of “follow”.

Most, if not all, search engines today recognize this tag.

Furthermore, if you do not want the search engine to keep a cache of your page on their servers, you can affix a “noarchive” value to the “content” attribute, such as in the example below:

<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow,noarchive” />

Google, for example, will see the “noarchive” value and not keep a copy of your page in its cache.

How to Use the META Keywords Tag

The Meta Keywords tag used to be an important way to get your page listed under specific keywords under the search engines. Nowadays, however, major search engines like Google and Alta Vista ignore this tag, and the keywords tag no longer has the significance it used to have in the early days of the web. You can read specific details about what is important to these search engines in their ranking of your page in the following articles:

  • Google Search Engine Positioning Tips

    http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/google.shtml

  • More Tips on Google Search Engine Results Placement

    http://www.thesitewizard.com/sitepromotion/moregoogletips.shtml

  • Alta Vista Search Engine Placement Tips

    http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/altavistaranking.shtml

I no longer use this tag on my new pages, since it’s mostly useless nowadays.

The META Keywords tag should be placed in the <head> portion of your web page. If you are using a WYSIWYG editor, there is usually some way for you to enter the keywords on the page using a separate dialog box. If you are typing it yourself into your web page, the tag looks like the following:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”put your keywords here” />

In place of the phrase “put your keywords here”, you should of course give a list of your keywords. The keywords should be comma-delimited. That is, if you want to your page to be listed when the user searches for “medical help” and “free diagnosis”, you should use the following tag:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”medical help, free diagnosis” />

Each search engine has its own limit to the number of characters in your keyword list. The general advice given is not to make your list longer than you need it to be. Some search engine experts recommend that you do not exceed 1000 characters in your list. In the days when it still recognized the keyword tag, Alta Vista did not use anything beyond 500 characters.

A word of caution. Although you might think that this is a good place to put in common misspellings of keywords that you spelt correctly on your page, you should probably note that in the days when search engines indexed the keyword list, some of them penalized web pages that contain words that cannot be found on the page itself. They were probably trying to guard against abuse by people trying to “spam” the index. The latter have been known to dump every conceivable keyword they can think of even if it is unrelated to their web page. Unfortunately, this policy also penalizes legitimate site owners who really want to catch those common misspellings of their page content.

You can read more information about this in the article Your Website’s Spelling and the Search Engines at http://www.thesitewizard.com/sitepromotion/spellingerrors.shtml

You should also not repeat a particular keyword too many times in your tag. Again, some engines used to make a note of such things and penalize your site. Note that it is possible to accidentally repeat a keyword multiple times when you use a word in different phrases: eg, a tag that has the following keyword list, “search engine promotion, search engine ranking, search engine placement”, would have repeated the words “search engine” three times even though they occur in different phrases. Some repetition is apparently acceptable (possibly even up to three times), although excessive repetition is regarded as “spam”.

Practical Guide to Inserting Meta Tags

For those using a visual web editor to manage your site, you may want to check out the following tutorials on how you can actually insert the Meta tags using the editor:

  • How to Insert Meta Tags to Your Site in Dreamweaver
  • How to Add Meta Tags to Your Website Using Nvu or KompoZer

So how important is the Meta tag?

Although the benefits conferred by using the various meta tags on your page are not substantial, they are nonetheless useful in controlling how the search engines index and list your page. Since tags like the description and robots tag require very little effort to add to your page, it is probably a good idea to add at least these tags to your pages.

How the Meta Information Tag May Damage Your Website

Although I have written a number of articles on purpose of the meta description tag and how you can add it to your website, I’ve begun to have second thoughts about using it, so much so that I’m now wondering if it’s better in many cases not to include the tag altogether. This article discusses the problems that the meta tag may pose for your website, and some practical ways in which you can avoid the problems mentioned.

Video Tutorial Meta Information Tag

Preliminary: Context of This Discussion

For those who are not familiar with the meta description tag, you may want to read my previous articles on this subject:

  • If you don’t know what a META description tag is, and how to use it, you should first read my article on How to Use Meta Tags In Search Engine Promotion.
  • Dreamweaver users can find a practical guide on how to insert this tag, among others, in my tutorial on How to Insert Meta Tags to Your Site in Dreamweaver.
  • If you use Nvu or KompoZer, the practical guide for inserting the META description tag can be found in the tutorial on How to Add Meta Tags to Your Website Using Nvu or KompoZer.

Current Problems with Using the Meta Description Tag

Although the meta description tag is definitely useful in determining what the search engines print underneath your page title, judging from the results of various queries that I’ve used lately, it seems like Google is becoming more serious in using your meta description tag where available. Or perhaps it has always done that, and now more sites are becoming more aware of meta description tags and are adding them (to detrimental effects).

The problem with the meta description tag is that if your meta description tag is very generic, and the search engine uses it, it can lead to your site appearing less relevant to people searching for a term. In particular, your site may end up looking like a spammy site to some users, making them skip your link in the results and go on to another site.

Let me illustrate. Suppose you were searching for “widget XYZ review”, and got the following results. (Note: this is just an example. The underlined blue text in the box below are not clickable — they merely simulate the appearance of a search results page.)

Widget XYZ Review
Widget XYZ reviews – top widget reviews and analyses.

Widget XYZ Review
Read reviews of widget XYZ from users who have tried it.

Widget XYZ Review
Look up XYZ reviews and ratings from past and present customers.

Widget XYZ Review
When I first reviewed widget XYZ, I thought it to be a useful tool for creating a beautiful and functional website. Over time, however, I found…

If you received a such a listing, which link would you click? The first three sites have meta description tags with the key phrase you searched for, and as a result, have their meta description displayed underneath their site title. They seem incredibly relevant to the search phrase. But many seasoned searchers will instinctively distrust the first three links, even if they were really from useful, legitimate websites with genuine reviews. The reason is simple: they have clicked links that had such generic text in the past, only to find that these links led to spammy sites with very little useful content.

But look at the fourth site. The site did not have any meta description tag, so Google had to grab content from the page itself to display as the snippet. The result is a piece of text that seems like a genuine review, rather than some thinly disguised advertising site.

Not all sites that look spammy in the search engine results are actually spammy. The problem is that their meta description tags are so generic that they make the page look spammy when the pages are listed, since spammy sites often use the same generic text in their actual page content. Sadly, a number of my own sites’ pages also suffer from this very defect, since I’ve often been too lazy to think up of some descriptive text after writing the actual article. Judging from the searches I’ve done recently, it looks like my sites are not alone in having this problem.

Possible Solutions to the Spammy-Looking Meta Descriptions

Here are some possible ways to avoid having your site look spammy in the search engine results when it has real content.

  • Don’t Dump Lists of Keywords into Your Meta Description Tag

    Nothing looks more spammy in a site’s snippet than long lists of keywords dumped unceremoniously into a meta description tag. Don’t do it.

  • Put Real Content in Your Meta Description Tag

    Take time to write content in your META description tag instead of writing an overview of the page’s content. That is, instead of writing “Review of Widget XYZ”, write “I found widget XYZ to be a…” (etc). One way to do this is to copy your some of the most relevant sentences on your page into the tag.

  • Remove Your Meta Description Tag

    Instead of putting some of the text on your page into the tag, another way is to just remove the tag altogether. This will cause search engines like Google to scour your page’s content looking for relevant snippets to place in the search results. There is no guarantee as to what it will find, or whether the text will even be relevant. But if your page is filled with normal sentences rather than just bits of text like “Add to Shopping Cart”, there is a chance that you’ll get a better snippet than just some short, generic “Review of Widget XYZ”.

    Note that you may not want to do this if your page is just a shopping cart checkout page, since such pages usually have very little text other than things like “Quantity”, “Check out” and the like.

Is It Time to Panic?

If you are the sort who is inclined to panic, and want to rush off to fix your site after reading this article, consider the following points.

  • The search engines fine-tune their algorithms incredibly frequently to adjust to the realities of the web. What is true today, may not be true tomorrow. If you react every time they make a tweak, you may be slaving away unnecessarily on things that may no longer need to be attended to in the future. Google, in particular, tries to figure out what most webmasters do and adjust to it, so there is always the possibility that your meta description woes may one day be an issue of the past without your having to do anything. But then again, they may not.
  • The Meta description text isn’t always used in the search engine snippet. If the user searches for “Widget XYZ” and the phrase doesn’t occur anywhere in your meta description even though you have such a tag, Google will use an actual occurrence of the phrase “widget XYZ” from your page’s content for its snippet. In other words, there may not be any cause for panic, since (potential) visitors may not even search for the words that appear in your tag.

Second Thoughts on the Meta Description Tag

Although the meta description tag is often seen as a way to help your site in the search engine results, it may actually harm your site depending on how you implement the tag on your web pages. My current sentiment on this is that if you are not sure how to craft a good meta description tag for your page, leave the tag out and let your content do the talking.

Why Don’t You Use the Key terms Meta Tag on Your Website?

On a few (rare) occasions, some people have written to ask me why I don’t use the keywords meta tag on the pages on thesitewizard.com. One of them even asked me how he could hide his keyword meta tag so that his visitors could not see what keywords he placed in it. This article is an attempt to answer this question.

What is a Keywords Meta Tag?

The keywords meta tag is a type of HTML tag that webmasters place on their web pages. It generally looks like this:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”your keywords here”>

It is not displayed by the web browser.

Why The Keywords Tag is Now History

To understand why I no longer use the keywords tag, a little history is in order. Note that the dates below are rough dates, based on my vague recollection of the events. I didn’t bother to record the actual dates when it happened and it was a very long time ago.

  1. 1995-1997: The Rise and Abuse of the Keyword Tag

    In the old days before Google, back when Alta Vista was considered one of the ruling search engines, the keywords tag was used by webmasters to tell search engines that the words listed in the tag can be regarded as being part of the content of the web page. It was indexed in addition to the words that appeared on the web page itself. It had its uses, such as to place common spelling mistakes of keywords on the page.

    As you may have guessed, there was widespread abuse of this tag, with some webmasters dumping words that had nothing to do with their web page in the hopes of attracting visitors to their site. Others saturated the tag with terms they considered important, in the hopes of improving the keyword density of their site.

  2. Circa 1997: The Demise of the Keyword Tag

    The end result of this was that, one by one, the search engines took steps to end the keyword abuse by not indexing anything in that tag. If my memory serves, the last to do so was Alta Vista. They even took it one step further: words occuring in the keyword tag that did not also occur on the web page itself would cause the page to be penalised.

    Google was born around this period. Learning its lessons from the search engines that came before, Google simply ignored the keywords tag. It continues such a policy to this day.

In other words, by the end of the 1990s, the keyword tag was no longer useful for any purpose.

What to Do with the Keywords Tag

Although my older pages on thesitewizard.com have half-hearted attempts at including keyword tags, all my newer pages do not. Those older pages either pre-date the death of the keywords tag era or were based on an older template of my website that had the keyword meta tag. With the updating of my site design somewhere after the turn of the century (or whereabouts), all my new pages no longer have the tag.

If you also have old pages with keyword tags, you can do the same as I did: just ignore them. Alternatively, if you can be bothered, you can also remove them at your leisure when you happen to update the page. They neither do your site any harm, nor do they help it. It’s the equivalent of adding nonsensical HTML tags to your web page: they will be ignored by everyone, search engines and browsers alike.

If you have a new web page, don’t even bother with the keywords tag. If you feel you must use a meta tag somewhere, see my article How to Use Meta Tags for Search Engine Promotion for more useful ones instead. The tags mentioned there are still recognized by today’s engines.

Why Are You Asking This Question in the First Place?

I think the more important question is why a person might be asking about keyword tags in the first place.

  1. Are You Being Conned?

    As you can see from the brief history given above, the keywords tag has not been relevant to website creation since the end of the previous century.

    If you obtained your information about the keyword tag from someone claiming to be a search engine optimization specialist, purporting to help you update your site for a fee, be very careful.

    The fact that anyone, in this day and age, can still be talking about using keywords meta tag tells you something about that person. They are either incompetent and outdated (and are thus not going to be able to help your site) or are trying to bamboozle you with strange esoteric terms like “keywords meta tag” which they think will mystify a layman (in which case they cannot be trusted).

    I myself have also been contacted by such charlatans before, so I won’t be surprised if the visitors asking me this question are doing so because they have heard from such people. If you are one of those who have received such emails, or have met such web designers, take this warning to heart. Don’t fall for that line.

    If you want to make sure your website is search engine ready, see my article How to Create a Search Engine Friendly Website instead. It may not contain mysterious magical incantations that pretend to help you rise to the top of the search engine results, but they are practical, straightforward and realistic tips that have helped many webmasters.

  2. Stay on the Straight and Narrow

    Another class of questions that I receive concerning the keywords meta tag comes from those who want to hide the tag from their visitors, so that the latter cannot see what keywords tag they use.

    While of course the tag is no longer relevant, so whether you hide it or not does not matter, the question betrays an attitude to website creation that is, in my opinion, not beneficial to the webmaster in the long run. It seems to me (and I may be wrong, of course) that someone asking such a question is trying to find some underhanded way to get to the top of the search engine listings and hiding that information from others who may examine their web page for such tracks.

    Here’s how I look at web design: when you create a website, your site is just a means to an end. If you are selling some product, then the site is there so that you can make online sales. Ultimately, you want to spend your time fulfilling that goal — making sales, shipping the product, improving the product or whatever. The same goes for other types of sites, be it a blog, social networking site, tutorial site or some other type. The website is just a way for you to reach your goal. It is not the goal itself.

    If you go down the path of using unscrupulous methods to “game” the search engines, you will find that you will have to spend an inordinate amount of time and effort working on the “means” itself, year in year out, instead of the “end” (your goal). This is needed because you have to stay ahead of the search engine programmers who are always tweaking the search engines to weed out such trickery. And those programmers work full time on their engine (and there are many of them). To stay ahead of them, you will practically have to work full time to figure out new tricks to replace obsolete ones and hiding those tricks.

    This is of course not something webmasters want to do. They want to create a site, and then focus on what the site lets them accomplish. If it’s an online shop, they prefer that the site run on autopilot and they can just concentrate on shipping their goods (etc). Even if yours is a blog or tutorial site (which obviously can’t run on autopilot), you will still want to spend time writing new posts or articles rather than running around frantically trying to protect your dark secret.

    Focus on the content and purpose of your website. Improve its quality. This yields far better results in the long run than going with some shady fad-of-the-week.

Conclusion

So, the short answer to the question of why I do not use keyword tags on my site is that they are no longer relevant today. And they have not been relevant for a very long time.

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