Re: Does metadata matter any longer

[Gregory P Sweet <gps03 -at- health -dot- state -dot- ny -dot- us>]

My experience is that meta data, without a doubt, is still very important
to search enginesâcritically so with document types other than HTML. Google
for example uses the Title meta data of PDFs and other document types as
the link to the document. The description if available, will show up as the
blurb under the link, and keywords, while useless for indexing will still
match entered keywords which is really good for truly esoteric searches.

Here's an example of how meta data can go terrribly wrong:

We found that people searching for NYSDOH forms were not able to find the
appropriate form, even though Google was accurately finding the forms and
returning the result in the top ten results.

Here's why: Form authors had copied a document with a different title &
description to create their forms, and when distilled to PDF, the wrong
info was passed to the title field. Google accurately found the forms
through full text search, yet users couldn't find the form in the search
results because the title presented as the link and the little blurb under
it (the description)  was completely un-releated to the form.

We've since re-writen our content posting curriculum to include section on
the importance of includeing accurate meta data when posting content to the
web.

Cheers!
-Greg

techwr-l-bounces+gps03=health -dot- state -dot- ny -dot- us -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com wrote on
02/01/2011 02:21:52 PM:

> From: John Posada <jposada99 -at- gmail -dot- com>
> To: List,Ã Techwriter <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
> Date: 02/01/2011 02:21 PM
> Subject: Does metadata matter any longer
> Sent by: techwr-l-bounces+gps03=health -dot- state -dot- ny -dot- us -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
>
> Hi, guys...we're on a content-evaluation and review kick of our
> external support web pages and I've defined a bunch of criteria that
> we are using to evaluate content.
>
> One of the criteria I've used to review the content was whether the
> page included title and description meta data. About 91% of our
> material does not.
>
> So,,, the question. Before I dedicate resources for updating our
> content, for the major search engines (Google/Yahoo/Bing), is meta
> data an important tool in finding/ranking web content or has the
> technology moved on to more sophisticated criteria?
>
> Thanks
> --
> John Posada
> http://jposada.zenfolio.com/
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