Do search engines index the miscellaneous meta tags?

This test will seek to determine if search engines index the miscellaneous meta tags within HTML source code.

For the purposes of this test, I am defining the miscellaneous meta tags as:

• META NAME="TITLE"
• META NAME="AUTHOR"
• META NAME="OWNER"
• META NAME="SUBJECT"
• META NAME="RATING"
• META NAME="ABSTRACT"
• META NAME="REVISIT-AFTER"
• META NAME="LANGUAGE"
• META NAME="COPYRIGHT"
• META NAME="ROBOTS"
• META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires"
• META HTTP-EQUIV="PRAGMA"

Testing Methodology

This page contains all of these meta tags. This meta tags can be seen if you view the source code to this web page.

Evaluation Methodology

View the source code to this web page to view the meta tags.

Search for the unique string from the meta tags in these search engines.

Search Engine	Expected Result
Google	No
Yahoo	Unknown
MSN	Unknown
AltaVista	Unknown
AllTheWeb	Unknown

If this page shows up in the search results, then that search engine most likely indexes that meta tag.

Caveats

This page was put online on 9 May, 2004. It will take some time for each search engine to crawl and index this page to make this test "live."

A malicious person could link to this page using the unique string in the title tag as link text. This would force a false positive on most search engines and invalidate the test results.

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