Google use of meta tags with template sites

[saboy1]

I have built custom sites from scratch that rank #1 in Google for my desired keywords because of fairly good SEO design. I built a new website using a template company, and they do not allow me much control over the meta tags. They have title, description and keyword meta tags.

What I want to add is :
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW">
<meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="index,follow">
<META NAME="Revisit-After" CONTENT="14 Days">

In your own experience and testing, what is your findings about the use or non-use of the above tags?

thanks
John Visser
RE/MAX Communities

[Jim Messenger]

John,

None of the ones in your above example are needed. Also note that Meta Description & Meta Keywords are deprecated with Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and ASK.

[lasvegasrealestate]

I still post them, but they aren't all that important any more by a long shot. I use a generic all robots tag for indexing and it seems to work fine. Search engines are looking more at the page content and title than the other meta information.

[naplesrealestate]

I believe that this meta tag "<META NAME="Revisit-After" CONTENT="14 Days">" has not been used in years. At one time it helped search bots to know how often to revisit a page for new information.

IMHO - the search bots probably realized that once a web page was put up it rarely was changed. LOL

[Jason Painter]

I believe that the meta keywords are probably just about useless today in Google algorithms.

[naplesrealestate]

Jason - personally I think that meta keywords have been overlooked for a number of years by the major search engines due to spamming. I would still use them though, because you never know what lurks in the hearts of the SE engineers. LOL

[Ocean30]

We did some testing last year on metatag keywords - I included keywords that we nowhere else on the site and found that google did pick up our sites for some of the keywords.

The metatag description continues to be key from the perspective of what is displayed frequently with the seach results.

Dave

[naplesrealestate]

Dave,
Did the keywords show on the page as well as in the keyword meta?

[Ocean30]

for the test the only place that we had the meta tags on the site was in the "meta tag" line - nowhere else on the site.


note: our test were early 2006 and there have been lots of changes since then...