Metatags: yay or nay?

In my opinion you should always install basically metatags like encoding, og tags (they’re for example sharing url on social media – images, description etc.), canonical (avoid duplicate content), noindex for pagination on archives (just for sure for no duplicated content and it’s really unnecessary to index them), and for multilanguage sites og:locale:alternate metatag + <link rel='alternate' it gives nice results in search engines and avoiding duplicate content in some cases (for example for always English content placed on every language).

Metatags are mainly for purpose you need.
I personally use as much metatags as are proper to my purpose.
Let’s see Ctrl+U for simple script: https://maciej.kuzniczysko.pl/tools/rom/pl

I respectfully disagree with odie2… I avoid meta tags, because I’d rather force Google to read & crunch my content entirely, without any help.

– Sean

Hmm…so is it better to let Google decide what makes your content relevant to certain searches? Do the Google gods even look at meta tags or do they consider/assume them to be spam/irrelevant?

Maybe I told wrong.
I mean that in my opinion locales’ meta are needed for real multilingual websites.

And others are mainly needed for standalone pages like scripts – if they are something small.
However, it’s always better use https://schema.org/ instead.

Not the first time I’ve been recommended Schema, seems like something worth looking into. Thanks!

As per my other answer – it is 100% best SEO practice to use meta tags. In the same way that a book in a bookshop must have a title, description and a cover, so must a website. There is simply no question of not doing this.

Ok, thanks! Is there proper etiquette to using metatags? As in some maximum allowance you should use before it’s too much?

Hi Lauren, yes there are thresholds in terms of length. If either your title tag or your meta description are too long they will be truncated.

There are lots of tools out there that you can use to preview them, eg:

https://www.portent.com/serp-preview-tool

The best advice I think is to be natural with them – treat them like you might a PPC ad – but not to try and cram in keywords or be spammy.

@ Lauren – Yes, schema is HIGHLY useful, although I don’t use markup on my website currently.

@ Colin McDermott – Please read this, as you’re confusing Title Tags & Meta Descriptions with META KEYWORD TAGS: https://www.wordstream.com/meta-tags

– SV

@ Colin – Welp, guess I was confusing the jargon per that post I linked to above ;). I’m so used to always talking about “Title Tags” and “Meta Descriptions” with clients, that I failed to realize “Meta Tags” includes those as well as “Meta Keyword Tags,” which I don’t think SEOs should use today! – SV

Hi Sean, no worries.

It’s always so tricky when people talk about meta tags as they can often be referring to so many different things…

Cheers