"META" tags are all but useless, and only useful at all if they
are carefully created by human evaluation and judgment. Any
attempt to create automatic ones is not likely to produce any
meaningful result.
That's not true !
Lot of search engines rely on meta tags.
The only search engine we get lot of traffic from is Google
(which ignores META tags). The rest are almost ignoring us
and this is one of reasons.
That's one reason why Google is the only search engine that
matters; they discovered long ago that META tags provided no
useful information, so they evaluated pages on their own.
Information is only useful when it is honest and accurate.
Because search-engine rankings are economically valuable, the
natural incentive is to manipulate the self-descriptive
information in META tags to achieve the result, rather than
making them honest and accurate. Because of that, search
engines that use META tags rank highly those who are most
adept at manipulation, not those of most real value.
I would not oppose some means of allowing authors to add META
tags that were honest and accurate and based on human judgment.
But if we created META tags by some automated process just to
get higher rankings on search engines that still use them,
then we would be guilty of manipulation just as other
advertisers are.
--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee(a)piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC