Does "index,follow" Help Ranking?

[mthorpe]

Does it help your ranking if you add the meta tag <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="index,follow"> along with the normal meta tag <meta name="ROBOTS" content="index,follow">. Anyone?

[RonPK]

IMHO: no. That would be an easy trick!

[ThomasB]

didn't help in the test I made a few months ago.

[JohnieWalker]

Maybe because he wants to be called by his version_name too (Googlebot/2.1) ... ;)

Won't help either.

[jdMorgan]

Neither the <meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> nor the <meta name="Googlebot" content="index,follow"> tag is useful at all, because "index,follow" is the default behaviour.

The only reason to have either of these metatags on your page is if you use a content management system to create pages, and need the default-value robots metatag to be there as a placeholder so that the content-value can be dynamically populated from a database for convenient robot control across many pages.

Other than that, they just push your real content further down the page, bloat your code, and dilute your on-page keywords slightly.

Jim

[osfp]

"if you use a content management system"
jdmorgan can you tell us please how that system works or if there is a software that you can use

[internetheaven]

Other than that, they just push your real content further down the page, bloat your code, and dilute your on-page keywords slightly.

How can the robot metatag dilute your keyword densities?

[internetheaven]

Other than that, they just push your real content further down the page, bloat your code, and dilute your on-page keywords slightly.

I'l ask again as this is quite an important statement you've made:

Are you saying that Google treats meta tag information as part of the web page?