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HIDE YOUR WEB META..POSSIBLE OR NOT?

Posted: Sun Feb 03, 2008 8:44 pm
by mhonnphp
Hello,

Is it possible to hide meta tags using php or
is there any direct way to hide meta tags using html/javascript?
if yes how? please help...
I need this for SEO purposes.

Thanks

Re: HIDE YOUR WEB META..POSSIBLE OR NOT?

Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2008 3:34 am
by Kieran Huggins
You can't "hide" meta tags, the whole point is for them to be visible to search engines.

At the very best you could try to identify the User Agent as a known spider and include them in your output based on that, but I have a feeling it would be problematic at best.

Check out http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2168001 for more.

Re: HIDE YOUR WEB META..POSSIBLE OR NOT?

Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2008 8:05 am
by JAM
I'd like to task a followup question; Why do you want to hide the meta info? There is always the possability to change (and by that, remove aswell) meta's using header(). But this shouldn't be something that has to do with SEO(?).

Please clarify why you need to hide them because for me personally, there's no real reason why anyone would want to do that. Just personal interest.

Re: HIDE YOUR WEB META..POSSIBLE OR NOT?

Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2008 8:37 am
by Inkyskin
If your worried about potential competition 'stealing' the same tags as you - you need not be concerned. Search engines don't just use meta tags, they scrape all of the content on the page too. And a lot of that is cross referenced with your meta tags.

You could have no meta tags at all, but if two sites are very similar, it won't make that much difference between rankings (Providing you both have a similar pagerank and backlinks etc).

Re: HIDE YOUR WEB META..POSSIBLE OR NOT?

Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2008 9:33 pm
by mhonnphp
JAM wrote:I'd like to task a followup question; Why do you want to hide the meta info? There is always the possability to change (and by that, remove aswell) meta's using header(). But this shouldn't be something that has to do with SEO(?).

Please clarify why you need to hide them because for me personally, there's no real reason why anyone would want to do that. Just personal interest.

Inkyskin is right, I'm worried about our competitors.
anyway, thanks Kieran Huggins for clarification about meta tags
and Inkyskin for additional information.

Thanks again and God bless

Re: HIDE YOUR WEB META..POSSIBLE OR NOT?

Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2008 9:50 pm
by Benjamin
You could only display them to search engines by identifying them at runtime.

Re: HIDE YOUR WEB META..POSSIBLE OR NOT?

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2008 9:22 am
by Kieran Huggins
Just for clarification: if you send the meta tags to search spiders they'll be indexed in the search engine's cache, which is visible to all. There's really no sure fire method to maintain SEO secrecy.