Keyword confusion

I think that's only "fair use".. I use the "description" but not keywords myself. I find it odd that people would start confusing meta keywords with employment affiliations... I suppose there's always someone out "trolling" for something new to kick up a fuss about... If they start reading Meta tags looking for hidden messages, I'd say they have 1) too much time on their hands 2) not good enough understanding of the web to be doing that sort of activity (I.e. if they take the time to read other people's HTML but NOT getting that meta keywords is a search engine "helper") Just my 2 cents as usual ;-)

Excerpt: Keyword confusion...

I'm curious as to how someone would make the link from keywords to employment affiliation, particularly when Scott is specifically mentioned in the entry. It seems like a giant (and almost ludicrous) leap of logic. Using that logic, Newly Digital's original list of contributors could have been assumed to be your employees (as well as each following contributor, had you been inclined to add each name into the keywords.) (If that's the case, my employment paperwork is on the way!) If you had used Scott's name in an untoward manner -- specifically to get hits to the post, for example, without there being any reference to him in the entry -- I could understand why this practice might be considered wrong or possibly unethical. But that's not the case. It was a misunderstanding, and easily cleared up.

What about the general practice of including subjects of the text in your keywords field. Who else is doing this? Is there an accepted standard of some sort?

I also should mention that I wouldn't be half as bothered by the negative reaction if it hadn't come from Scott. I consider Scott a friend and I want to avoid causing harm to friends.

I'm going to punt on whether you should or not, I can't make up my mind. You should however consider that using the cite tag in the body of the page might prove more useful in the long term. Example: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/12/27/pushing_the_envelope.html

In the article in question, I didn't actually cite any references, so the cite tag doesn't seem to me to be the best way of doing things.

If you're savvy enough to be reading the meta data, you are probably savvy enough to figure out the connections of the meta data. My first thought would be, "does this page have anything to do with Scott Johnson?", not IM Scott and ask.

I'm with Mr. Gales, and I commented similarly on Scott's blog as well: Did they read the page at all? Or just the META tags? Why do they need to run to Scott in this kind of tattle tale mode of "You're in Adam's META tags!" Why do they care where Scott works. I've commented about him twice in the past 10 minutes (there and here) and I'm still not interested where he works (although now that I think about it, I'm assuming it's something web-nerdy like Adam... and like me too so don't take offense at "web nerdy"... 'Spose I could look for an "about" page on Scott's site that might just flat out tell me where he works, which is what this IMer should have looked for! Wow long parenth! Sorry :-D).

I can tell you why Scott is concerned if people think he works for me. Scott is an independent consultant. He works for himself, developing Web sites and running the excellent Feedster and developing Inbox Buddy. So you can see why Scott might be worried if people are confused about his employment. It could have an impact on his income.

adam, i see absolutely no problem in using the subject of your post's proper name in the keyword tag, especially if you do it consistently... that's what the keyword tags are for, in my opinion, to help a machine pull together meta data about the page that it might need help pulling together on its own... I actually applaud the idea of using real keywords on each individual post based on a human touch versus letting a machine decide which keywords to put into the meta tags, and also applaud you using different keywords on each post (that takes guts to commit to doing for every post). I know that I've worked for three publishing companies, and it's something we've always wanted to do (add meta data to articles or published web pages that'll help our machines (bustome search engines) find articles for readers better) but we've never actually done it for fear that the multiple humans entering articles and stories into the CMS won't follow the same guidelines for creating meta-data (keywords) on every story the same way each time (humans are fallible remember?). But, if I thought like a news organization, I'd say that you'd definitely include the subject of your article's name in the keywords tags... especially if your search engine used the keywords tag to rank articles... For example: If I worked for a newspaper, and entered a story about, oh I dunno, an island like Puerto Rico, then, I can guarantee you'd see "Puerto Rico" in the keywords tags. If I wrote a story about Dan Akroyd, you'd see "Dan Akroyd" in the tags, and more importantly, you'd probably see variations on his name (if his real name is something else like Daniel Akroyd, or if I knew his middle name you'd see that). You'd see those terms because hopefully, that'll help my search engine index that article higher than an article that quotes Dan Akroyd twice talking about SNL (when the subject of second article is SNL)... hopefully... just my thoughts. bottom line: yes, I think its perfectly acceptable to use Scott Johnson's name (or anyone else's for that matter) in your meta keywords tags, as long as 1) you're own internal search engine uses those tags to index articles for relevancy, and 2) the article is about Scott, or Scott's quote plays a vital role in the article, and thus that article should show up higher in a search for "Scott Johnson" in your search results. As you publish more and more stuff, these tags may in fact become ever so more important to your users that are searching for something they remember reading, or for something new to read on a certain subject.

damn... that could have been an entire weblog entry on my own site couldn't it have been? heh... next time it'll be much shorter.