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Sat 10 Apr, 2004 07:58 am
I had always heard that google entirely ignores meta tags. But a few weeks ago, my listings on google went from "showing 1-14 of 130" to "showing 1-14 of 50." It just quit delving deeply into my site. The only thing I can think of that I changed in that period was the addition of meta tags in accordance with some SEO program I downloaded...
Is google looking at me unfavorably because I put in meta-tags, or because they're over a certain length (they're only at 200 characters), or something?
Thanks in advance.
Well, setting META NAME="ROBOTS" to noindex &/or nofollow on your pages (or using robots.txt to similar effect) will certainly hurt you.
Other than that, well, there are of course some things you can do that have the potential to make Google look at you unfavorably (eg. cloaking, linking to link farms, etc.), but Google doesn't penalize for using meta tags, they just ignore most of them.
One thing is that you might've lost some backlinks (or some value of your backlinks), then google recalculated your pagerank, & based on that criteria they no longer spider your site as deeply. But if that was all that happened, then unless you moved the location of the pages they shouldn't have actually removed pages from their index.
You're possibly just getting different results from differnt Google servers at the moment.
If you stuffed your meta tags with "keyword spam" then they might penalize, but I'd look at other reasons first.
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