anecdotal observation - beware meta tags

NOOPD - NOARCHIVE - also banned all image bots - got blown out of serps

[Mike McKnight]

a couple of weeks ago it was posted in a WebmasterWorld forum about the
"new meta tag NOODP" - I have had one particular search term
a very important one for me a $money$ term that has
been #1 on serp 1st page but it has for a year or so always used our ancient ODP title or our co. name and ODP snip. Not too useful these days.

Also I have thought that I do not want G to cache our webpages because many items are one of a kind and we do change prices from time to time so it's not good to have cache to show old prices , and sold items.

So I thought I would put in two new meta tags - NOARCHIVE
and NOODP on all of our pages and decided to ban ALL
image bots at the same time. BAD MOVE!

Within a week or so, we lost out money position for that
money search term - went back to 3rd or 4th page and many other terms/pages suffered similar fate. Orders dried up.
I was devastated by this self inflicted injury.

So I undid all these changes and prayed for world peace.

It took about a week to 10 days but our 1st position on page one came back as did other pages and good position results.

Orders are back as strong as ever, maybe even better
than usual!

It is obvious that I'm not too smart about why these things
happen, but I thought I'd pass my observation along just in
case there might be one or two others as gifted as me.
hope this helps
Mike

[egurr]

It isn't you. Google is a ship that appears more and more to be run by very average captains.