Computational justification for the use of meta descriptions and keywords
Search engines have a lot of work to do crawling the web constantly. There must be a lot of computational power required to constantly parse html pages and grant rankings for the enormous number of sites now out there. As such, it makes perfect sense for a search engine to want to speed up that process in any way it can. The use of meta descriptions and meta keywords help search engines speed up their algorithms by not having to parse your entire page. It just has to read the header information and it can move on.
The problem is that people realize this so they do a bit of keyword stuffing to try and give them a boost. Search engines don’t simply ignore your page when you use keywords and descriptions. They just don’t parse the entire page as often if you’re meta keywords and meta descriptions match the content on your page. If they don’t match, of course your site will require more processing because they have to parse the entire page and not just trust your keywords and descriptions.
The use of meta tags saves search engines tons of time. Since you do them a favor, they do you a favor and you get higher rankings.
August 5th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
I slept on this idea and now its not making much sense to me. A better way to skip processing pages would probably be to hash the page and compare the current hash with the previous hash for the page. Its a quick way to see if something has changed on the page.
If the hashes are different then they’d parse the entire page to see what’s changed. I’m trying to justify my original post in my head but I can’t think of a reason now that meta tags would help save computations for search engines.