What Are Meta Tags Used For?
When the Internet was young, meta tags dominated the SEO landscape. Unfortunately, “black hat SEO” techniques that exploited meta tags forced many leading search engines to deprecate them. Those search engines are slowly reversing their ban on them as they become more sophisticated.
Meta tag information was developed to help categorize websites. While mostly invisible to visitors, they provide search engines and directory curators with important information as to what the website is about, who wrote the content, who owns the site, and the general topics it covers. With the introduction of elements like security certificates, robots.txt, sitemaps, and the increased value of backlinks, their importance was diminished.