Editing Meta element (section)

===Effect on searching===
[[Google]] does not use HTML keyword or meta tag elements for indexing. The Director of Research at Google, [[Monika Henzinger]], was quoted (in 2002) as saying, "Currently we don't trust metadata because we are afraid of being manipulated."<ref>Greta de Groat (2002). "Perspectives on the Web and Google: [[Monika Henzinger]], Director of Research, Google", ''Journal of Internet Cataloging'', Vol. 5(1), pp. 17–28, 2002.</ref> Other search engines developed techniques to penalize Web sites considered to be "cheating the system". For example, a Web site repeating the same meta keyword several times may have its ranking ''decreased'' by a search engine trying to eliminate this practice, though that is unlikely. It is more likely that a search engine will ignore the meta keyword element completely, and most do regardless of how many words are used in the element.

[[Google]] does, however, use meta tag elements for displaying site links. The title tags are used to create the link in search results:
<syntaxhighlight lang="html">
<title>Site name - Page title - Keyword description</title>
</syntaxhighlight>

The meta description often appears in [[Google]] search results to describe the link:
<syntaxhighlight lang="html">
<meta name="description" content="A blurb to describe the content of the page appears here" >
</syntaxhighlight>Additionally, enterprise search startup [[Swiftype]] considers meta tags as a mechanism for signaling relevancy for their web site search engines, even introducing their own extension called Meta Tags 2.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://swiftype.com/documentation/meta_tags2|title=<nowiki>Meta Tags 2</nowiki>|date=2014-03-10|website=Swiftype|access-date=2017-11-08}}</ref>