Web site owners and search engine optimization professionals used to spend a lot of time worrying about meta tags. Which keywords should be added to the KEYWORDS tag? How to compose the content in the DESCRIPTION tag?

These days the issue of meta tags is easy to handle: They no longer play any role in ranking your site in the major search engines.

Come again? Yes, Bing and Google along with Ask and any other search engines that pass for competition do not use information from meta tags for ranking your site. It’s as simple as that.

If you want to go the extra mile, you could optimize the description tag, which Google may choose to use in the snippet on the search results page. It is not relevant to ranking, however.

To help the search engines robots crawl your site properly, you should mind your ROBOTS tags:

  • <META NAME=”ROBOTS”
    CONTENT=”ALL”>
    tells the search engine to index the page. However, this tag is superfluous. Search engines will also index pages without this tag.
  • <META NAME=”ROBOTS”
    CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
    indicates that a robot should neither index a document, nor analyze it for links.
  • <META NAME=”ROBOTS”
    CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”>
    means that a robot should not index this document, but that it should index the pages it is pointing to.

Note though, that if you need to limit the search engines access to your site, it is better to put a robots.txt file in the root directory of your site (provided that you have your own domain).