Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Why doesn't the Wikipedia homepage have meta tags?
-
Why doesn't the Wikipedia homepage have meta tags?
-
To add on to Gaston's Reply,
Wikipedia is up that Top 10 or 20 sites that could do everything wrong ( in fact some do ) regarding SEO and still rank number 1, Google's reasoning for this is basically, their too big to fail. If people started not seeing wikipedia pages, heads and traffic would roll.
So since Google knows that traffic will continue as long as certain sites are always listed, they will overlook their SEO issues.
I don't know for how long though, as I see pages from wiki that are awaiting deletion ranking on page 1 and 2 sometimes, not to mention the sometimes completely inaccurate information on some of wiki's pages, although rare doesn't boast well for SERPs relevancy.
So to put it in otherwords, Wikipedia is above the law...
-
I sincerely doubt it's a strategic choice not to have one, though.
-
Well, less a reason than an explanation. To be honest, I have no idea why they didn't use meta description when first establishing the site. It stands to reason, though, that by this point they don't have much incentive to add it.
-
Wikipedia is one of those sites that doesnt have much of SEO optimization.
Another example is the underscore in their URLs.. -
Thank you Matt. I meant to write meta description, completely my fault.
So you're saying Wikipedia's main reasoning, if you had to guess, for them not having a meta desc. would be just because they don't need it?
-
I'm actually seeing some in their source, notably meta charset and <title>. You're right that there's no meta description, for example, which is interesting, but they don't exactly need it. ;)</p></title>
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Looking for opinions on structuring meta title tags/page title/menu title/H1
Hi everyone I am hoping a few of you can share your opinions. I have been having conversations (okay, healthy debates) about how to write/structure meta title tag and how to compliment them with the H1, page title, menu name. To help explain the thought processes I will use a pretend keyword. How about "screwdriver". Case: (I made this up) we are redesigning a website for a construction tools manufacturing company (pretend name: ABC Tools) targeting OEMs who are interested in purchasing large quantities of tools. The product categories (to become main menu items) are Screwdrivers, Nails, Drills, and Hammers. (bear with me .... this is just an example I am making up on the fly) K. Circling back to screwdrivers - let's say we have one landing page (a primary category page and in the main menu) listing products and great details about screwdrivers. Focus keywords are screwdriver manufacturer, screwdriver supplier, construction screwdrivers Below are questions being debated. If you are willing ... how would you address these questions? And, can you explain WHY? QUESTION ONE: How would you structure the meta title tag (feel free to write one of your own) Screwdriver Manufacturer - Construction Screwdriver | ABC Tools ABC Tools - US-based Screwdriver Manufacturer Supplier Near You High-Quality Screwdrivers for Construction with ABC Tools QUESTION TWO: how would you write the H1 on the page? Would it match the meta tag? OR, would you write something different using the primary keyword? QUESTION THREE Remembering this is not a blog post ... it is a primary landing page linked to the main navigation. What would the menu title be? (remember the product categories above are how the main menu items are bucketed) Screwdrivers Screwdriver Manufacturer Typically in WordPress, the H1 and the menu title is auto-populated using the page title (not the title tag)... So, if we use Screwdrivers as the page title but we want the H1 to match the meta title tag, would we manually change the H1? Or, have the page title and title tag match, but manually change the menu item?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brenda.Haines1 -
Is it still true that 3xx redirects don't cause you to lose any ranking?
In this: https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo it says that simply redirecting - provided you don't change anything on the page - isn't going to cost you rankings. Is this still true, or is there any new data/case studies that have been done since? I haven't seen anything updating it and just want to make sure because it's from 2016. We want to do simple 301 redirecting without any changes to the page. Or has anyone had an opposite experience?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AngieJohnston1 -
Google cache is showing my UK homepage site instead of the US homepage and ranking the UK site in US
Hi There, When I check the cache of the US website (www.us.allsaints.com) Google returns the UK website. This is also reflected in the US Google Search Results when the UK site ranks for our brand name instead of the US site. The homepage has hreflang tags only on the homepage and the domains have been pointed correctly to the right territories via Google Webmaster Console.This has happened before in 26th July 2015 and was wondering if any had any idea why this is happening or if any one has experienced the same issueFDGjldR
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adzhass0 -
Do 404s really 'lose' link juice?
It doesn't make sense to me that a 404 causes a loss in link juice, although that is what I've read. What if you have a page that is legitimate -- think of a merchant oriented page where you sell an item for a given merchant --, and then the merchant closes his doors. It makes little sense 5 years later to still have their merchant page so why would removing them from your site in any way hurt your site? I could redirect forever but that makes little sense. What makes sense to me is keeping the page for a while with an explanation and options for 'similar' products, and then eventually putting in a 404. I would think the eventual dropping out of the index actually REDUCES the overall link juice (ie less pages), so there is no harm in using a 404 in this way. It also is a way to avoid the site just getting bigger and bigger and having more and more 'bad' user experiences over time. Am I looking at it wrong? ps I've included this in 'link building' because it is related in a sense -- link 'paring'.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
What's the deal with significantLinks?
http://schema.org/significantLink Schema.org has a definition for "non-navigation links that are clicked on the most." Presumably this means something like the big green buttons on Moz's homepage. But does anyone know how they affect anything? In http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/schemaorg-a-new-approach-to-structured-data-for-seo#comment-142936, Jeremy Nelson says " It's quite possible that significant links will pass anchor text as well if a previous link to the page was set in navigation, effictively making obselete the first-link-counts rule, and I am interested in putting that to test." This is a pretty obscure comment but it's one of the only results I could find on the subject. Is this BS? I can't even make out what all of it is saying. So what's the deal with significantLinks and how can we use them to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NerdsOnCall0 -
Meta NoIndex tag and Robots Disallow
Hi all, I hope you can spend some time to answer my first of a few questions 🙂 We are running a Magento site - layered/faceted navigation nightmare has created thousands of duplicate URLS! Anyway, during my process to tackle the issue, I disallowed in Robots.txt anything in the querystring that was not a p (allowed this for pagination). After checking some pages in Google, I did a site:www.mydomain.com/specificpage.html and a few duplicates came up along with the original with
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
"There is no information about this page because it is blocked by robots.txt" So I had added in Meta Noindex, follow on all these duplicates also but I guess it wasnt being read because of Robots.txt. So coming to my question. Did robots.txt block access to these pages? If so, were these already in the index and after disallowing it with robots, Googlebot could not read Meta No index? Does Meta Noindex Follow on pages actually help Googlebot decide to remove these pages from index? I thought Robots would stop and prevent indexation? But I've read this:
"Noindex is a funny thing, it actually doesn’t mean “You can’t index this”, it means “You can’t show this in search results”. Robots.txt disallow means “You can’t index this” but it doesn’t mean “You can’t show it in the search results”. I'm a bit confused about how to use these in both preventing duplicate content in the first place and then helping to address dupe content once it's already in the index. Thanks! B0 -
301 doesn't redirect a page that ends in %20, and others being appended with ?q=
I have a product page that ends /product-name**%20** that I'm trying to redirect in this way: Redirect 301 /products/product-name%20 http://www.site.com/products/product-name And it doesn't redirect at all. The others, those with %20, are being redirected to a url hybrid of old and new: http://www.site.com/products/product-name**?q=old-url** I'm using Drupal CMS, and it may be creating rules that counter my entries.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brocberry0 -
Meta Keywords: Should we use them or not?
I am working through our site and see that meta keywords are being used heavily and unnecessarily. Each of our info pages will have 2 or 3 keyword phrases built into them. Should we just duplicate the keyword phrases into the meta keyword field, should put in additional keywords beyond or not use it at all? Thoughts and opinions appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus1