Over Meta Tagging

[Circlecast]

Reading the other meta tag post. I was wondering it is possible to over do it when it comes to meta tags? Do to many meta tags harm your search engine listings more than help?

Here is what I have on one site.
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en" />
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
<meta name="keywords" content="parent, help, childern, dicipline, raise, mental, issues, emotional, disturbance, disturb, problems, fear, bed, wetting, lying, runnning, away, fun, stories, jokes, kids, parental, parents, child, school, education, parenting, the, and, advice, kids, learning, abuse, add, colour, pictures, of, medical, advice, all, my, abuse, childrens, furniture, emotional, abuse, bedding, relationship, advice, sound, advice, verbal, abuse, advice, missing, advent, games, elder, abuse, statistics, pictures, love, advice, single, foster, marriage, advice, skills, christian, articles, teenagers, alienation, syndrome, indiana, play, station, control, victims, kidnapping, support, encouragement, encourage, enrich, right, support" />
<meta name="description" content="Parental Help, Is a site for parents to help parents with different issues." />
<meta name="rating" content="general" />
<meta name="author" content="Bryan Goodwin, Lastingimages" />
<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright © 2003-2004" />
<meta name="generator" content="XOOPS" />
<meta name="ICBM" content="36.014556 , -101.82609" />
<meta name="DC.title" content="Parental Help - A parental support group" />

The last two I know are not actually needed I was just trying out a few sites that requested that I put them on the site. Not that I get any hits from these sites.

Also keywords is there a particular format? I have heard both, use spaces after the comma cause some search engines have a hard time reading the entries with out them. Then I have heard that the spaces are not needed, and all they do is add to the size of your page.

Is there some meta tags that are missing that I need or am I suffering from meta tag overkill?

[cbp]

This is all you need:

<meta name="keywords" content=" delete most of the ones you have listed - only use those few that the page is targeting/>
<meta name="description" content="Parental Help, Is a site for parents to help parents with different issues." />

plus the title

CBP

[larryweiss]

I concur. Im not even confident you need those. Many experts feel that search engines dont even bother with keywords. There are plenty of well placed sites with nothing between the head tags.

[HardCoded]

Yes, harm more than help. With the likely exception of keywords and description, for the poor bugger SEs Yahoo and MSN. It actually saddens me that I have to focus back on those totally spammable BS metatags for those poor engines.

[skyrocket]

Someone advised me recently to keep the keywords and description meta tags in - even though they seem to be ignored these days. Their advice is that the search engines may change their algorithms and place an emphasis back on them once more. They do no harm being there and could come back into vogue one day. Is that a valid argument?

[Dave Hawley]

that a valid argument?

Very valid argument and great advice.

[mushroom]

Originally Posted by Circlecast

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en" />

I would also keep those 2 tags the frist for the browser the second for the SE's (for people only that want english).

The most inportant tag is missing or not included in your post

<title>......</title>

[Niko Holopainen]

Does anyone have experience on whether SE's take the language definition into account or no? I'm wondering whether we should use it or no...
Any opinions valued.
Regards,