Do search engines index the description meta tag?
This test will seek to determine if search engines index the description meta tag.
The description meta tag was designed for webmsters to tell search engines users what a web page is about.
Here is an example description meta tag:
<meta name="description" content="Do search engines index the description meta tag?">
Testing Methodology
This page contains a description meta tag. This description meta tag 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 description meta tag.
Search for the unique string from the description meta tag in these search engines.
| Search Engine | Expected Result |
|---|---|
| No | |
| Yahoo | Yes |
| MSN | Unknown |
| AltaVista | Unknown |
| AllTheWeb | Unknown |
If this page shows up in the search results, then that search engine most likely indexes the description meta tag.
Caveats
This page was put online on 22 April, 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 description meta tag as link text. This would force a false positive on most search engines and invalidate the test results.
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