Attempting to understand search bots/meta tagging

[astro]

Hi,

In my current search for knowledge I am interested in the meta tags and whilst there is now a school of thought that say they are a waste of time (not convinced of this) do search bots actually obey tags geared to them?

for example
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">

<meta name="revisit-after" content="10 days">
and/or
<meta name="expires" content="1 day">

My point of view is (and shoot me down) at the end of the day it is a mistake to assume any intelligence from what is a program conducting it's pre installed set of instructions. Lets face it , it may be fast but can only count to one! So why would the robots actually do what is requested of them? I have seen

<meta name="revisit-after" content="2 days">

Plus whilst trying to get my head round stylesheets (CSS) please can anyone explain

<meta name="verify-v1" content="j0gEx7rNXBrU0o/y3FISylafcuWoQlg8yuN/cYbPXP8=" >

why does it need to be in the tagging part of the head of the page?

Head hurting a bit (so please beam me up now!!)

Astro

[inertia]

Originally Posted by astro

In my current search for knowledge I am interested in the meta tags and whilst there is now a school of thought that say they are a waste of time (not convinced of this) do search bots actually obey tags geared to them?

Hi Astro,

Firstly - some meta tags don't do much, some do more, some do nothing, some are essential. You get the idea!

Originally Posted by astro

for example
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">

This tag essentially asks the bots to index your site. Which they will by default anyway. Therefore it is a complete waste of time and coding.

The opposite of this tag uses "no index" and "no follow" commands. These are useful for telling the search engines to NOT index pages but in my opinion the better option in this case would be to use a robots.txt file as this keeps more coding external to the page.

Originally Posted by astro

<meta name="revisit-after" content="10 days">

Waste of time, search engines don't re-visit your site just because you instruct them to. They follow links back to the site and if you have enough of them they will re-visit your site more regularly than every 10 days. This tag was invented to tell bots how often you update your site so they knew when to return but as far as I'm aware they can figure this out for themselves now anyway.

Originally Posted by astro

and/or
<meta name="expires" content="1 day">

This tag is supposed to tell the SE when content can be removed from the index. I've not had much experience with it and honestly don't know if it works anymore - probably not. Can anyone else help?

Originally Posted by astro

My point of view is (and shoot me down) at the end of the day it is a mistake to assume any intelligence from what is a program conducting it's pre installed set of instructions. Lets face it , it may be fast but can only count to one! So why would the robots actually do what is requested of them? I have seen

The description tag is, in my opinion, the most important meta tag. The description will appear in the SERPs so it needs to be eye catching and it also has some weight in SEO. The keyword tag often causes arguments and the conclusion is that Google doesn't pay it any attention but Yahoo and MSN still do. I often add common spelling mistakes in the keywords tag whether it does anything is still a bit a mystery though! These are the only meta tags that i use.

Originally Posted by astro

please can anyone explain

<meta name="verify-v1" content="j0gEx7rNXBrU0o/y3FISylafcuWoQlg8yuN/cYbPXP8=" >

This is the verification tag which Google uses to validate your site when you sign up to Google Webmaster Tools.

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by inertia

This tag is supposed to tell the SE when content can be removed from the index. I've not had much experience with it and honestly don't know if it works anymore - probably not. Can anyone else help?

Dont worry about this tag.

[Duncan Pollock]

The consenus is that meta tags are no longer as important as they once were, the main reason being that black hat people increasingly started using them to manipulate SERP results.
Nowadays Google in particular takes no notice of them to speak of.
Nevertheless, it does no harm to use the description and keyword tags. Even Google seemingly doesn't altogether ignore them.
The other tags are of almost value at all, however.

Duncan