- From: Roy T. Fielding <fielding@gbiv.com>
- Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:18:45 -0700
- To: Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>
- Cc: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
On Aug 19, 2009, at 6:28 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote: > Perhaps. Does the crawler you worked on have the ability to trust its > documents? yes. > @rel=keywords became completely poisoned on the public web > by people spamming it with repeated or irrelevant keywords (like porn > sites embedded completely unrelated things so they'll show up in > searches for more than just porn). > > Depending on your burden of proof, you may *never* get an answer here. > @rel=keywords was created by and for search engines, and it is in > search engine's best interests to be elusive about what they pay > attention to. Current experts in the field of SEO clearly believe > that @rel=keywords is of little to no use in the real world, and > several (I linked two of them) bluntly recommend not using it at all. That is factually incorrect in so many ways. First, meta keywords was not created by search engines -- it came from library cataloguing. Second, it was abused by some public sites after it was given too high a relevance on public web search engines, and that abuse has tailed off considerably since they removed its relevance [no abuse was experienced within non-public enterprise documents and enterprise search engines]. Third, experts in SEO are talking about use of keywords improving SEO, not for its use in general as a tool for cataloguing documents. >> But that shouldn't influence the >> HTML5 language itself, only potentially advice on how and when to >> use it. > > Possibly. On the wide web, though, it is certainly a 'failed > proposal'. No, it is only irrelevant for referral-based search engines. Such engines have absolutely no role in determining what is or is not valid HTML. ....Roy
Received on Wednesday, 19 August 2009 23:19:19 UTC