negative meta
This article was published before 2022, therefore before the rise of generative AI. Some information may now be outdated. The period drawings and visuals shown here were created without the assistance of artificial intelligence.
Despite the outcry against <meta> desc and keyword, decreed by the self-proclaimed masters of SEO, I remain strongly attached to them:
- They cost nothing and are very simple to implement.
- Whatever people may say, it is often my <meta desc> that shows up in the results for many of my sites on Google (yes, even today in 2011).
- Many crawlers other than Google use them (how many directories or other tools rely on meta tags, often making your job easier).
- They can certainly serve as a catch-all and be misused, but that is true of just about anything on the page. Someone who wants to game Google will do it in meta tags just as they will with all other recommendations.
It was by feeding this reflection about meta tags that I told myself that, very often, we have thought little about things in negative terms on the web! Let me explain: if it is indeed welcome to provide words that correspond to the content of our website, would it not be just as relevant to be able to provide meta tags that would signify “anti-words”? For example, if my site deals with pig diseases (yes, I know, that is very specific), I would not especially want a user looking for information about guinea pigs, or worse, about “cochonnes” scenes, to land on my site! So I would make:
<meta name="Keywords" content="cochon, porcin, élevage, maladie, traitement" />
<meta name="NegaKeywords" content="Inde, cochonne, sexe" />
What do you think?