It’s official: Google pays no attention to meta keywords

Matt Cutts of Google, and Google itself have now officially announced that they do not use meta keywords at all mostly due to past abuses, and with Google having over 83% of the search engine market share as of October 29, 2009, they are the ones you need to pay attention to. The breakdown:

1. Google – Global 83.13%
2. Yahoo – Global 6.84%
3. Baidu 4.38%
4. Bing 3.39%
5. Ask – Global 0.58%
6. AOL – Global 0.55%
7. AltaVista – Global 0.08%
8. MSN – Global 0.06%
9. Excite – Global 0.02%
10. All the Web – Global 0.02%
11. Lycos – Global 0.01%
12. Microsoft Live Search 0.00%

Matt Cutts also mentions that meta description does nothing to increase SEO, but if you have it, they may use it as the snippet in search results for a particular site, page or post.

Bottom line? Spend your time creating high-quality original content, use appropriate categories and tags on your posts, use descriptive titles and don’t worry about meta tags. They simply aren’t worth your time.

WordPress.ORG automatic upgrade

It wasn’t until just today that I felt confident enough to use the WordPress automatic upgrade for my self-hosted blog. I’ve been reluctant in the past due to reported problems, and have stuck to doing it manually. I’ve done it manually so many times that I can almost do it in my sleep.

This morning I bit the bullet and decided to give it a try. I did a complete backup of my entire site via the backup wizard in my account cPanel, deactivated all my plugins and hit the button. Five seconds later the upgrade from 2.8.4 to 2.8.5 was finished. I reactivated my plugins and all is well.

A big thanks to the AutoMATTic team for this feature. Now if only Joomla would take a page from AutoMATTic’s playbook and add this feature.

SoundCloud is now working on my blog

The issue with the SoundCloud player not showing up for me that I reported here and here has been fixed. It took quite a bit of back and forth between staff and me, but the issue is resolved. Although they did not say, I had reported to them that the actual SoundCloud code was using XHTML param tags

<param>parameters_here</param>

and that WordPress was using self-closing HTML param tags

<param parameters_here /> .

Who knows if that was the actual problem or not, but Safari and Firefox on Mac were both pitching a fit saying there was a missing ending param tag. Obviously they were looking for XHTML versions of the param tag rather than the HTML versions, which puzzles me a little; both are – or should be – valid.

Anyway, many thanks to the WordPress.COM staff, and Sheri in particular, who stuck with this issue and finally whipped it.