The announcement was made in a post on the Google Webmaster blog the other day and has triggered the usual speculation and discussion that surrounds Google’s regular dissemination of information, most of which involves the usual picking apart of the statement looking for hidden meaning. Perhaps Dan Brown’s latest book is stirring up the SEO industry in its week of release?

Our View on Meta-Keywords

Our view on keywords has always been simple and straightforward: don’t bother. We have seen no difference in ranking ability of two pages that possess and lack keywords respectively, none whatsoever. Likewise, we have never seen any impact on ranking come about as a result of meta-keyword tweaking.

Meta-Descriptions Make Sense

The post also mentions that Google has not used the Meta-Description field for ranking purposes for a number of years, however, our experience is that the description field can actually aid matters as it plays a crucial role in determining the click-through rate of a listing on a search engine ranking page (SERP). Our view is that the higher the CTR on a link, the likelier the associated page is to rank more highly. Furthermore, the higher the click-through rate of a page, the more traffic you’re likely to attract, so a well optimised and written description can really make a difference.

If you don’t include a meta-description then Google will select a snippet of text from your site, which might not work as well as a bespoke one. We use the meta-description field to display the Mackerel Media phone number on the SERPs page, as you’ll be able to see here. Neat eh?

Looking to the future, we can only hope that now Google has cleared keywords up, they’ll move swiftly on to link spam blogs, dubious paid link vendors and all the other fun issues that keep us busy. Hmm…perhaps we’re a little too optimistic.

In one case we suspected sabotage, and in another it was probably something that was forgotten about when the site went live (the developer using robots.txt to restrict search access instead of having a separate development environment most likely, still no excuse), but whatever the case the impact is severe and perhaps even catastrophic for a site or business.

The robots file can be used to some effect to aid search engine optimisation efforts, or to aid the transfer from an old site with its outdated architecture and navigation to a new site with its new structure, for example:

URL Removal via Webmaster

You can request the removal of old URLs or directories from Google’s index by adding them to the robots file, then submitting a request via the webmaster console. This is particularly useful when whole directories become redundant and need to be removed from search engine indexes.

Sculpting Link Juice

This is one of those SEO techniques that seems to attract an equal mixture of praise and criticism, but it is one way of controlling how internal links flow around your web site, and from there how much ‘equity’ or ‘link juice’ you pass from one page to another. The theory says that you can focus link juice from – say – your home page on to a select few sub-pages and in doing so raise their ranking.

The recent announcement from Google on the canonical tag does (to a certain degree) render this redundant, but until we see conclusive proof it works, we’ll remain on the slightly sceptical side of the fence.