Hi all,

Someone called me the other day wanted advice for their site. Their site was ranked for a selection of keywords throughout the site (all low competition) and they paid a web company a small amount of money to help them get better rankings.

However...you get what you pay for...and this company added the following tags to their top level pages:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="VW96.OBJECT TYPE" CONTENT="Document">
<META NAME="RATING" CONTENT="General">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="index,follow">
<META NAME="REVISIT-AFTER" CONTENT="7 days">

Now I understand what the bottom 2 mean, but not the top 2 - what are the top 2 tags?

Once this web company added the tags my friend complained that his rankings depleted and he lost all his rankings; his pages are still all 'listed' in Google though, so it's not sandboxed.

On top of this he uses Google webmaster tools and has submitted a sitemap.xml file there.

My guess on what happened is that somehow these tags have confused the spiders and has meant the site is not gettiong ranked for its keywords - has anybody else got any ideas.

Thanks in advance.

Misch

He actually paid money for this? He needs to seek a full refund ASAP. It makes me sick that these companies claim to sell SEO services and don't have a clue what they're doing.

Here's my take on the META tags that I often use:

1. Title Tag - it's critical to have good title tags that directly relate to the content on the page. Many of your title tags should also support the main KW theme of your site. KW themed title tags become less important as you build KW rich links to that specific page (In other words, KW anchor text on inbound links trumps your title tag).

2. Description Tag - still has importance because some search engines will use it as the page description. Yahoo, for example, uses a snippet of the description tag. It's importance is more to drive clicks to your site from people reading the site description on the search results page than it is for SEO purposes.

3. Keyword Tag - hold very little importance in SEO. I still use them, but that's mainly for me to at a glance reference the KW's I am targeting on that page. I have a lot of sites and I'm getting older - I need all of the reminders I can get!

4. Robots META Tags - Sometimes it's easier to use a noindex or nofollow on a single page than it is to open my robots.txt file, edit it, then upload it to the server. I use this tag for EXCLUSION purposes only. Search engines will index all pages that DO NOT contain an exclusion on the page or in the robots.txt file. Some of my CMS sites do insert the index. follow tags, but they are not required.

 I also use the "NOODP" and "NOYDIR" robots tags on some sites so that the SE's don't index the home page title tag as the Open Directory or Yahoo Directory title. This isn't such a big deal now, but there was a time when Google and Yahoo were picking and indexing those titles.

5. META http equiiv - I use it to identify encoding

6. Base HREF - Depends upon design of the site.

7. Link Rel - I use it to identify my favicon and any RSS feeds on my site

As you can see, most of the tags I listed have nothing to do with SEO. They are driven by the needs of each site. Tags like "ratings" are not important to me, but if you are tring to certify your site as a family friendly site that tag might be important to you. But it has nothing to do with SEO. There are a ton of meta tags that fit that description.

For SEO, the Title tag and Description tag still come in to play, as does the robots tag. Not much else matters.