What is Metadata?

By Jason Eichner

You may have heard of metadata from a variety of different sources, and in very different lights. Some will tell you metadata is a security breach waiting to happen, whereas others may espouse how useful metadata is for SEO.

So what’s going on here? I tend to find security breaches and SEO aren’t especially compatible; and that holds true here. Part of the problem is there are two very distinct forms of metadata, both of which can impact your business – I’ll be covering both in this article.

The word metadata simply implies data that refers to other data, or specifically data that is appended to something to provide additional info about said thing, without impacting the look or function of the thing itself.

There are two important forms of metadata in the digital world; document metadata and web page metadata, often called web meta or meta content.

Document Metadata

Document metadata is easy to understand, but can cause problems for those who aren’t aware of it.

Document metadata is additional information about the document that is not visible or presented anywhere within the document, but can be read by programs or users to glean additional useful details about the document itself.

Many common file formats now carry a lot of metadata by standard. This blog post was originally written in Word 2016, and taking a look at the metadata attached, I can see the title of this document, the names of everyone who edited it, the number of revisions it has been through, the program I used to edit it, and even how long I have spent with it open. There are plenty of other metadata slots that are unfilled, as well.

Metadata can be extremely useful. People often tag music or images in large folders so they can search by tag. If I tag every photo as I take it with who appears in that photo, I can then go back and search for a single person, and see only photos in which they appear.

However document metadata has caused problems in the past, typically when people are unaware of the additional information they are sharing. For instance, many phones and GPS-enabled cameras now automatically put location metadata into any photos they take. This can useful, if you want to know exactly where or when a photo was taken, but can also be a privacy concern as many websites do not strip out this metadata when you upload to them, and thus photos uploaded online can provide a pinpoint map reference of where you are; something you might want left private.

People often don’t realise the amount of data they’re giving away with just a simple file. To demonstrate this, I’ve opened a random photo on my hard drive that I downloaded a while ago. Now this photo is just of a piece of computer hardware – no harm there, right? Well, taking a look at the metadata in this picture, I can see exactly where this photo was taken, that the photo was edited in Adobe Photoshop before being uploaded, and I can even see the precise details of the camera used, such as the camera model, f-stop, and that the flash wasn’t used to take this photo. I can see when this photo was taken, the name of the photographer (or whomever the photographer gave the photo to), and even that the photographer manually adjusted the white balance while taking the shot.

A stunning amount of information is given away with many files. While some of this data can seem harmless, it can work as a dangerous tool in social engineering, and always prevents a privacy concern. I would recommend stripping out unwanted or unneeded metadata from files before uploading them or sending them somewhere public or insecure.

So view the metadata of a file in Windows, right click the file and select “Properties”, and then “Details”.

Website Metadata

Website metadata follows the same basic principles as its document counterpart: additional data about the page that is publicly accessible, but not visible on the page.

Website metadata poses little to no security risks, as it is generally all entered manually and is largely optional, however website metadata is extremely important for SEO, and so it is well worth knowing how it works.

Website metadata is typically used to provide information to search engines and other websites that may link to yours, such as on social media. Websites are too complex and too variable for robots to always accurately understand the meaning of the page, thus metadata takes out all the hard work and provides this information up-front.

The most important metatags are the Title and Description tags – together these two tags play a vital role in a page’s SEO. These tags are what is most commonly displayed in search results, so make sure these make sense and look good to a reader. The most popular search engines are very good at noticing keyword stuffing anyway, so that is no longer a viable tactic, and can often cause your search ranking to drop.

 <title>
<title>This is the title of your page</title>
<meta name=”description”> This is your page description. This will also appear in search results as the search description</meta>
</title>

Some people still insist on using meta keywords; an old piece of metadata that just listed random words that had some vague association with the page involved. Meta keywords are no longer paid attention to by most search engines, so there is no reason to include them.

Your title needn’t be as simple as “Business name – page name”, and the same goes for your description. You can use the character limits of these to include relevant, helpful keywords that also form coherently structured phrases that a user of a search engine will find helpful, for instance:

Title – “Kogo – Home – Sussex based disaster recovery”

Description – “Kogo is a managed service provider based in Sussex that provides sophisticated security and protection solutions for disaster recovery and systems management.”

Rather than simply listing exactly what my page is called and does, I have informed the typical searcher of exactly what my page is likely to include; useful for keyword search algorithms, but more importantly means that every hit my website gets from a search engine is more likely to become a lead.

I hope that has helped clear up any confusion about what metadata is and how it works, see you next time!

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