Add option to disable meta keywords

[ren!]

Hey there,

This thread: http://get-simple.info/forums/showthread.php?tid=3693
brought up sth. interesting in regards of meta keywords

... meta keywords are no longer used by any search engines, time to leave them out of Page Options?

They are not used for ranking, keywords are indeed still used and relevant for other things including internal tags.

Timbows idea has good reasons but aims at the wrong target

11:15, restate my assumptions:
1. meta="Keywords" are no ranking factor for search engines.
2. get_header() delivers meta="keywords" when Tags/keywords is not empty
3. Not using 'get_header' can lead to problems with certain plugiins
3. Inserting Tags in Page Options can make sense for internal Plugins or theme-functions
4. Some webcatalogues read out the meta-keywords to categorize listed websites, there might be other good reasons to have individual, specific and relevant meta keywords for each page
5. Displaying keywords in meta "keywords" which are used for template/plugin functionality, might be bad. seeing something like: <meta name="keywords" content="_special_superDuperPage" /> sucks.
btw. I thought Tags with underscore are not used for meta-keywords...

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I propose to let the webmaster decide if he wants meta="keywords" be displayed when get_header is called.

How about sth like this in GSCONFIG:
# Uncomment to never display <meta name="keywords" />
# define('GSNOKEYWORDSINHEAD',true);

What you say?
good? bad? ugly???

[shawn_a]

Is this really an issue ?
Keywords might not be used for ranking, they also do not negatively affect rank.

Ultimately, this will be possibly addressed regardless via some other mechanism.

Checkbox per page to use or not show meta keywords for example is a better one.
Also possibly core actions to remove this via plugins more elegantly than a definition.

[ren!]

Is this really an issue ?

Its not a bug report it is a request to eliminate sth. which is useless in 90% of all cases (or leave it as it is when there is no problem,...)

Keywords might not be used for ranking, they also do not negatively affect rank.

I would say it slightly different:
Keywords don't improve ranking and maybe don't harm rankings.

Checkbox per page to use or not show meta keywords for example is a better one.

I had the same idea in mind before proposing a definition, but I came to the conclusion that
1. this checkbox might be confusing for 90% of all users
2. this would be an extra field in the pages XML file I think. adding a field for sth. which is not used in most cases makes not much sense

Also possibly core actions to remove this via plugins more elegantly than a definition.

I didn't think of that. Sounds good. I have to think about it. Still, i'm concerned that noob users might have crappy keywords in their meta without even knowing - by default.

As i m no hardcore coding plugin developer / hacker, I have no idea what the best solution in regards of performance is.

I'm curious what other GS-user think about the whole issue.

[shawn_a]

There is no such thing as keywords by default.
I mean its not an issue since its benign.

Also google is not the only search engine in the world.

The problem arises in that keywords are used for tagging and meta, this will be resolved by separating the 2, and making all meta output tokenized settings, which can simply be removed to disable meta output.

This is part of a larger outline that I went ahead and described here.
https://github.com/GetSimpleCMS/GetSimpleCMS/issues/598