[Web4lib] Metadata for Library Web Pages?

[Iris Jastram]

>
>
> I understood that the commercial search engines ignore inline metadata
> because they has been so frequently abused for index spamming.
>

This is not quite correct, though it may have been the case before the 
search engines became savvier about distinguishing "good" from "bad" 
metadata.  Recent studies have shown that search engines *do* favor 
pages that have title, subject/keyword, and description tags as long as 
the words in those tags don't repeat too often (I believe three times is 
the cut-off point for repetition).  They place these pages higher in the 
result lists and may index them slightly faster.  If I remember 
correctly, there's some difference between search engines and the way 
they handle html META tags vs. Dublin Core with some favoring one and 
some favoring the other.  When I was doing my research into the types of 
metadata that show up in pages currently indexed by search engines, I 
found that between 6 and 8 percent of pages had Dublin Core, and many of 
these doubled up by also having META tags.  Well over half of the pages 
I sampled had html META tags.  (When I get home tonight I can look in to 
the specific breakdown of the distributions if anyone's interested.)

There are several papers published that explore which tags help and 
which don't and how much they help or hurt based on appearance and 
ranking in many of the major search engines and subject directories.  
Three of these are by Jin Zhang and Alexandra Dimitroff, but I could 
only find one of them online. The citations are:

Zhang and Dimitroff. "The impact of webpage content characteristics on 
webpage visibility in search engine results (Part I)." Information 
Processing and Management.  41.3 (2005): 665-690.

Zhang and Dimitroff. "The impact of metadata implementation on webpage 
visibility in search engine results (Part II)." Information Processing 
and Management. 41.3 (2005): 697-715.  (This is the paper I could find 
online at 
http://mmlab.ceid.upatras.gr/courses/AIS_SITE/files/3%5CThe%20impact%20of%20metadata%20implementation%20on%20webpage%20visibility%20.pdf) 


Zhang and Dimitroff. "Internet search engines' response to metadata 
Dublin Core implementation." Journal of Information Science. 30.4 
(2004): 310-320.

Yours,
Iris

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Iris Jastram
Reference and Instruction Librarian
Gould Library, Carleton College
ijastram at carleton.edu
507-646-7105
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~