MOVIL.BE smile://it's a curve that makes things straight

I’ve got this question in my email last day. Since it’s something that many people ask, I say:
Why not to see how Google does on their own sites, for example YouTube ?
Many people adds a lot of irrelevant META’s that add nothing to the page (OH yeah: They add bytes, making it load slower)
So here we go with this example, showing that only 3 METAS are relevant. The page in question is a YouTube video of the Argentinian president. Now look how Google codes the META’s:

<meta name="title" content="Cristina presidenta">

<meta name="description" content="http://comparasuper.com Con todo respeto: Que hija de **** hehh! Prestar atención a los gritos de los negros del fondo. Cada que vez que veo algo asi estoy m...">

<meta name="keywords" content="presidenta, argentina, 2007, president,  cristina, kirschner">

Only 3. RELEVANT. To the point, no need more.
TITLE: Your video title
DESCRIPTION: Your video description (Only first 180 characters or so, no need for more)
AND KEYWORDS: Guess what ? The TAGS you use for the videos, no better keywords than that.

In this presentation, Rand Fishkin and Seomoz have made a poll between professionals SEO to get good numbers from different qualified opinions.

Statistics are better than guessing…so why not to take 10 minutes and watch this presentation ?

Frankly, it’s really strange that a big site like New York Times can plan a migration so badly loosing so many link references and content.
Simply, it would be a lot better to maintein IHT.com as it is, but of course that was not their plan. This makes me remember the W3c article “Good URLs don’t change“. What it’s interesting about the case, in my humble opinion, is how the internet community reacts to this and the power of the blogosphere+twitter connecting people. Quoting Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia:

“Looking ahead- from the perspective of Wikipedia editors – there may be a reluctance to cite The New York Times if there is no commitment to keeping stories in a static location. The New York Times needs to make a statement, It doesn’t have to be a big one, but they should emphasize they will not change around URLs.”

Read more:
We are migrating IHT.com