I have been observing internet search engine behavior lately and I’m beginning to believe that certain types of meta data in the HTML may elevate various web-pages to the top of search results. I haven’t found anything conclusive, but many of the top news sites include interesting meta tags, and I’ve noticed these meta types absence in similar output from Blog sites. I have often suspected that it would be relatively simple to control search results and hence elevate opinions on the internet by such manipulation.
I’m am not referring to the massive meta tags use in many pornographic sites that include anything, and everything so as to be included into any search results, but specific tag types and names. I’ll have to do more research, but in the mean time, I’ve made some attempts to include similar meta data in some of my blog output. I’ll keep you posted.
I’d be interested in your findings. I’d be quite surprised if the top search engines ascribed anything more than a minor weighting for meta tags or analysis of scipts used such as javascript. Most high scoring sites get there on the bases of inbound links and the engine’s relevancy analysis of those links together with document relevancy itself.
I haven’t formalized this but with to my previous content searches the thing I was searching was the actual title of a post. And while ‘tags’ are interesting some of the news sites are calling these ‘Keywords’ in the meta data as opposed to calling them tags. Blogs seem to wrap the tags up in HTML and mask the value of those labels. Where as ‘keywords’ were simple coma delimitated lists of keywords.