tedster - 10:50 am on Mar 8, 2001 (gmt 0)

Alta Vista has a lot to say on their own pages about what helps you and what doesn't. Here's their page about the META tags:

[doc.altavista.com...]

If you follow the rest of the links on the left of that page, you can pick up a lot of information. You will read that they don't pay much attention to the META keywords tag any more because of spammers abusing it.

"Many webmasters think that by using "keyword" METAtags, they are getting some advantage in the ranking or making up for the fact that their pages have very little text content, just flashy effects. But, those words are worth little more than any other word in the main text of the page. There is nothing "key" about it. You have simply added a few more words to the page in a place that is not visible."