Tagged Facts

Tagged facts are a recommendation from the Google webmaster guidelines for Meta Descriptions. Rather than just giving a sentence of description a webmaster can enter structured data. This is easier for Google’s indexer to process.

Tagged facts are a comma separated list of “tag: fact”. Here is an example from a page generated from a product database

<meta name="Description" content="Professional pigment-ink photo printer with separate ink tanks, Manufacturer: Hewlett-Packard, 
Category: Deskjet Printer, Name: HP Photosmart Pro B9180, Price: $699.99", Release Date: May 2008>

There are several key points. Do not repeat information that is already in the title element and don’t repeat information in the tagged facts themselves (spamming). The tagged facts can give searchers relevant information that may not otherwise be shown in the search results.

Tagged facts also lend themselves to automation with the facts coming from database column names and data from a product database. Google doesn’t give a list of tags, it suggests that items such as date, category and author may be relevant for a blog posting. It seems that Google will process any list of tags that follow the given format. However the feature has some similarities with the Dublic Core concepts.

The Dublin Core (as in Dublin Ohio) Metadata Initiative proposes a set of standard metadata for describing online information making the task of automated indexing and searching easier. Dublin core tags include such information as the title, creator, description, date and language. Some of these are already covered by standard metadata and some Web publishing tools insert their own unofficial meta data. Such as

<meta name=”author” name=”David George”/>

Tagged facts are a move towards a more semantic web as outlined by Tim Berners Lee of the W3C consortium in 1999. Web pages are generally written for humans and are hard for search engines to extract meaning. HTML can provide some structure, text in a heading level 1 should be more important than general paragraph text etc and tagged facts provide another level of meta data, at least for Google search.