Use of specific target_country and country meta tags

user_12329214 0
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The guidebook written by the Brazilian government regarding good practices in web development recommends using the following meta tags:

<meta name="target_country" content="br" /> 
<meta name="country" content="Brazil" />

It does not provide any explanation for why we should use them, though. The guidebook is a 10 years old document; there are visibly outdated codes there. However, that was not the case with those two meta tags: I could not find whether they are recommended or deprecated by W3C. I could not even find if they actually exist, to begin with.

Are the meta tags target_country and country useful? If so, what for? Are they endorsed by W3C, or considered a good practice by any other relevant institution, browser, social network etc.? Do they help increasing accessibility?

meta user-experience accessibility html
2 Answers

Forget Brazil for a moment because internet standards apply all over the world. That being said, I have never came across that tag in last 2 decades. Looks like outdated information and you shouldn't be worried about it. If (and it's a Big IF) they have made some kind of crawler or a directory/search engine themselves which does gives priority to this tag then it will be just limited in scope to that crawler/directory/search engine.

user_138208020

Short answer

Remove them if allowed, they are not valid and serve no purpose.

Long Answer

These definitely aren't part of the current spec for HTML5, I would guess they are HTML4 (if they were even relevant then, people did like to make up meta tags!)

Over on the wiki I can see that both "country" and "target_country" do not exist.

If you really need to display some form of location data use geo.country or geo.region etc. However Google ignores these anyway. so I am unsure if they have much use.

The only thing that I can think they may have been relevant for was for identifying the language of the page, but in HTML 5 you should be using the lang attribute on the HTML tag anyway.

user_27028940
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