Meta Rating Tag Options

[Snags]

Hello All,

Noob question
I just seen an old tag on a site with PR of 8. Was wondering if the
meta name="rating" content="general" actuarially cared some weight with the SE's?

All responses are welcomed and greatly appreciated!!!

[Grumpus]

If I remember correctly, that tag was originally used for Kid Safe surfing software. Basically, your kid uses a special browser and if the content rating doesn't exist or if it's at a level that's higher than you've set, then the person can't view the site.

Not used much anymore...

G.

[bragadocchio]

Hi snags,

Welcome to the forum.

I don't know that the search engines ever used or cared about that tag for ratings.

Since the days when that might have been a way to indicate to some software that a site was safe for children or not, there has developed a whole standard way of creating ratings. The W3C pages describe it, though it's actually thrid parties that issue the ratings.

Some of them issue their own labels and decide which ones are appropriate for your site. Some of them allow you to make that determination. One of the best ways to get one of these labels is through one of the links on this page:

http://www.w3.org/PICS/raters.htm

This is one of the ones linked there that I've seen labels used from a number of times:

http://www.icra.org/

Search engines do some filtering, but I don't believe that meta tags determine how that is done.

They can help you create a rating label specifically for you site.

[Snags]

U Guys are great thank for the Repones.
I am glad to be a posting member of this forum.


Thanks Guys!!!!

[bragadocchio]

You're welcome.

We're glad to have you here.

You question does point to the mystery of how search engines do filter pages for their "safe search" type results. How does Google determine which sites should be filtered?

While no filter is 100% accurate, Google's filter uses advanced proprietary technology that checks keywords and phrases, URLs and Open Directory categories.

yahoo! says less about their filtering:

Advisory: Yahoo! SafeSearch is designed to filter out explicit, adult-oriented content from Yahoo! Search results. However, Yahoo! cannot guarantee that all explicit content will be filtered out.

This paper pinpoints Google's statement that "no filter is 100% accurate."

[url=http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/google-safesearch/]Empirical Analysis of Google SafeSearch
[/url]

It appears from that article that safe search blocks a lot of stuff that it shouldn't.

Somehow though, I suspect that it might still work better than if everyone made their own meta tags and Google used those.

[Snags]

:? i have been looking at some high ranking pages for terms I have been researching and it is interesting how almost all those are using the "rating" tag. Which would lead me to believe that Google almost has to be giving this tag some wieght in the ranking. So I am going to do some testing on this to see if i can determine if this is true. :?

[Ruud]

The rating tag is still more or less widely used. Therefore the relation between the use of the tag and ranking is similar to you smiling and the sun rising: they can coincide but there latter is not caused by the former.

Repeat your research and check how many of those sites use any other HTML tag. If the relation between those tags and the ranking is similar as to your findings on the use of the rating tag you'll start to see there actually is no causal relation.

Ruud

[bragadocchio]

I sincerely don't think it does Snags. I think most of what Google looks at these days involve stuff that is actually visible on pages, and stuff that appears in links to those pages. There are quite a few different factors there.

The rating tags of the type you're discussing are often inserted by html editing programs, or by web masters who might have copied advice off an old article on meta tags. Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation on the web. Even from sources that present themselves as legitimate, timely, and experts.

I did a search for the word "http:" to see how many of the sites there came up with that tag. I expect it would be kind of fun to look at the first few thousand, and if I had the time, I might. I suspect that pagerank - the link popularity measure that Google uses - was the prime reason why most of these pages ranked highly.

Microsoft
Page Rank 10
http://www.microsoft.com/
<meta http-equiv="PICS-Label" content="(PICS-1.1 &http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html& l gen true r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))">


Altavista
Pagerank 9
http://www.altavista.com/
No ratings tag

Yahoo!
Pagerank 10
http://www.yahoo.com/
<meta http-equiv="PICS-Label" content='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.icra.org/ratingsv02.html" l r (cz 1 lz 1 nz 1 oz 1 vz 1) gen true for "http://www.yahoo.com" r (cz 1 lz 1 nz 1 oz 1 vz 1) "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0) gen true for "http://www.yahoo.com" r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))'>


World Wide Web Consortium
Page Rank 10
http://www.w3.org/
No rating tag


My Excite
Page Rank 9
http://www.excite.com/
No rating tag


Amazon
Page Rank 9
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/home/home.html
No rating tag

CNN
Page Rank 9
http://www.cnn.com/
No rating tag

Welcome to Lycos!
Page Rank 9
http://www.lycos.com/
no rating tag


There are actually quite a few different reasons why a site would do well in search results.

When Ruud says that "The rating tag is still more or less widely used. " he means by web masters, and by html editing programs. Unfortunately, it's not widely used by people and programs that index web sites.

[Snags]

:shock: ok i see what you mean thanks

I have read several articles like you described. It is difficult to tell what is the truth and what is just someones just giving out bad advise. I normally do research on anything new that I find to get different opinions on something because of this fact.

[Nefer]

Also, the sites that have rating tag are more likely to be older sites and therefore there have been more time for other sites to link to them, hence, higher rating.

[bragadocchio]

Hi Nefer,

Welcome to the forums.

There's been a lot of speculation that older sites tend to do better in rankings with Google. I'm prone to agree with you. I think you're right. I also suspect that the older a site is, the more likely it will have that type of rating tag, as opposed to one of the ones like the PICS-Labels for Yahoo! or Microsoft above.

Snags,

Good point here:

I normally do research on anything new that I find to get different opinions on something because of this fact.

That practice will serve you well.