Do html entities in meta tags influence indexing?

Question

I was wondering if using HTML entities in meta tags (like keywords and description) is the best way to go?

Does it influence the indexing from search engines?

Answer 1

The meta description can be used as the default snippet.

The meta keywords are pretty much completely ignored, but everyone still uses them anyway.

Neither will have much (if any) effect on your ranking, but a good meta description could boost your clickthrough.

Answer 2

I'd put the meta tags contents without entities as long as my charset allows the chars. I researched a bit and I found this on Google Webmasters/Site owners help and the example contains £9.24 not £9.24 nor £9.24

As is true that meta tags aren't a big factor for success, they can be a factor for failure. Indexer robots may detect a try of cheat them by using invalid keywords or description. From Wikipedia:

Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta tags provide a guide to each page's content. But using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable because the webmaster's choice of keywords in the meta tag could potentially be an inaccurate representation of the site's actual content. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data in meta tags could and did cause pages to rank for irrelevant searches. Web content providers also manipulated a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.

Answer 3

Meta tags are not ignored. There are still read by Google, so I think, they should be used in the proper way. Google loves pages done in proper way, but remember, that meta tag is one of hundreds things that robots take into consideration.

Answer 4

Entities make difference only in amateur HTML "parsers" done with regular expressions. They aren't problem for Google.