Sorry for the delayed replies, still getting used to being alone in this place, and discovering how many things I usually don't have to do for myself.
Also had to track down some webmasters linking to us with bad links...
NOTE: If anyone here happens to think that your code for our program is 944009, congratulations, you have 6 listings in Yahoo for our hosted free sites with your code stuck on the end. Unfortunately, that's neither the way our links are done, nor is 944009 a code for anyone ever in our program!
Okay, thanks much for the responses, and now to reply to them...
Surfn ~ I didn't want to make the question " Are sites without metas usually cheaters or complete noobs?" 'cause it would've been too confrontational. So thanks for answering my unasked question!
(I'm not doing confrontational stuff until I have at least a
's worth of posts behind me.)
MrYum and Jel ~ Thanks!
It sounds like a nice gangbang, some good people there.
UWarrior ~ Okay, first: "takes one to know one."
Second: Thanks for jumping in with your post... sounds like the gangbang's about complete.
Fido ~ Thanks for bringing up a good point. Yes, we saw that happen with a lot of pages on one of our domains after someone 'optimized' them for us. This was a few years ago, and we had to learn a lot quickly of about how
not to do irrelevant keyword stuffing.
From time to time I still run across old pages on some of our ancient feeder sites with comment tags, alt tags, and every possible tag attribute filled with 'relevant' keywords. This is not at all how we do things today. We've seen a lot better results just building content-rich pages focusing on whatever we know folks are looking for.
But keywords weren't supposed to be part of this thread, so we'll return now to the discussion on title and keyword meta tags. And maybe something about the suggested character counts for titles and descriptions
submitted to link lists (damn, I guess I really should have made those separate threads)...
Halfdeck ~ Thanks for joining in!
Yes, that "identical descriptions" is a problem we had with a site that got rejected for some dmoz listings. But we're actually seeing Google do the "similar pages" thing now on some of our HFS pages, with the similar pages being ones with other affiliate codes in the url (it has the same description since it really
is the same page).
We do use the 'branding' you mentioned, just not on our (hosted) free sites. Our tour page titles begin with FetishClub.com followed by something different for each page.
And yes, if on some page we've clearly described that page's reason for being there in a sentence or two, I'll use those identical sentences in the description tag.
Linkster ~ Glad to see you join in on this one!
Regarding the good points you made:
1. I did see that some LLs required meta title tags. That's part of why I made sure we're using them on all of our free sites.
2. Okay, and that could be pretty important on some free site pages where the text is mostly in graphics with matching text in the alt tags.
3. I definitely want to consider Yahoo, since they've picked up most of our HFS already (most with the webmaster ids in the urls).
4. I agree, it does seems like only a minute or so of work for a worthwhile return. I don't know exactly how the ranking algorithms work, but they sure do seem to like it when the title, description and actual page content match up in certain ways.
Regarding your "most important part" feedback - Thanks, and I couldn't agree more. I think you've seen some of our HFS, we're trying to do a good job providing good titles and descriptions on those. None of that "Blonds Fucked Hear - you now sea fuck her good long hard time."
This touches on the other part of what I was asking about. One question was about using the title and description meta tags, and I think we've nailed down that those definitely are worth using, and in fact are not useless at all.
But my second question was about the title and description that someone submits to a Link List. On our (hosted) free sites we use the same information for meta tags as we provide for LL owners and others to use, and I guess that's fine. But I'm still wondering if anyone (besides Swedguy) has suggestions for the length of the title and the description for a site being submitted to a Link List.
Too short is pretty easy, but what's too long for instance? We've been shooting for no more than five words in the title (3 when possible) and no more than 100 characters in the description. Swedguy's feedback was that 100 characters total between title and description may be better in some cases. Anyone else have guidelines on what's too long?
Simon