Meta Tags

Meta Tags

Meta tags were used to help search engines organize the Web. Documents listed keywords and descriptions that were used to match user queries. Initially these tags were somewhat effective, but over time, marketers exploited them and they lost their relevancy.

People began to stuff incredibly large amounts of data (which was frequently off topic) into these tags to achieve high search engine rankings. Porn and other high-margin websites published meta tags like “free, free, free, free, Disney, free.” Getting a better ranking simply meant you repeated your keywords a few more times in the meta tags.