Meta tags

Is this costing me big time?

[Skylo]

Hi everyone,
I have been in this forum for some time in the last few days just surfing around looking for opinions on meta keywords etc. I have found that there is often debate about whether to use commas to separate your keywords or not. A lot of opinions differ.

So what i did was: Took my most important terms and put those inbetween commas. Then followed that with the not so important words and separated them with the traditional space. My site was on the third page and now I cannot see it on the first 20 pages!

What do you think? Could this be harming my site in a huge way or do you think google is merely processing/reviewing the changes and i should maybe give it more than the two days waiting that i have done so far(Impatient am i).

Look forward to your valuable replies:)
Happy Surfing

[PCInk]

And when you tested for the nonsense word, which page (of the 3) came highest? Obviously, the meta tag only did not appear. But if the one with the meta tag AND the body contained the word came higher than the body text only version, then does that prove Google are putting a small amount of weight on these tags?

Also your duplicate content avoidance techniques will probably mess up the above (and the complete test), due to your changes in word count, density and word position (all of which play small a role in ranking).

Google tests never give total proof - never assume what you tested last week is still correct today.

[g1smd]

>> Google does not consider Meta tags as a criteria for ranking websites <<

The <title> and the meta description are important.