I know one site with 40000 daily google referrals, PR6 site. He is very liberal in the use of meta tags. Of course he has as much contents to match though. Your 2 cents?
Meta descriptions can still be useful to show a nice description in the SERPs, and even keywords can be used, and there's nothing that would STOP you from using them. There's no penalty for it or anything like that, so i'd encourage you to always use them, as it won't harm you.
Definetly. If you want description which differs from your title meta description is usefull. Also, keep in mind that many high PR sites are designed when meta tags were more useful than nowadays...
Meta tags are very very important, even more so with googles current supplemental results. Edit: How can you over use a meta tag?
Consider download speeds, if you have an extremely high-traffic page and really unwieldy metas. In other words hardly ever, unless you're about to get Slashdotted. Meta tags are still useful, because some search sites and directories make limited use of them. I personally read them to help me write directory descriptions on the sites I add manually, so a good meta description tag is always appreciated.
There are many smaller search engines where meta tags are still considered as an important factor so why not use them? Meta tags if used in proper way, can be beneficial for your site.
Blogspotter, I'd be curious also to hear what peoples opinions are on keyword stuffing... I used a meta robot to go through my site and went by their suggestion which I think was 14 or 20 words... here's the link: http://www.widexl.com/remote/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html Also, from what I've noticed MSN searches will have some of my keywords/description highlighted, so I believe that MSN does pull some of their results/relevancy by meta tags.
There are also script that you can run on your server to provide local search facility to visitors. Those scripts read your metatags to return information about each page rather than grab it from other search engines or page content.
Meta tags won't do much to rank high on search engines but it still useful in other ways. Like for example meta descriptions which generally describes your site to search engine and others. so I still suggest the use of meta tags.
Ive got 3 websites that dont use the meta keyword tag or the meta description tag at all.No they dont get rank on the first page yet but content is king and density the queen
I have heard rumors that meta tag doesn't count. But if at all it doesn't count, it will be only for google cause I am sure other search engines still use it
Not all meta tags are dead. The other engines (yahoo / bing) still may use the keywords tag although they are a tiny tiny tiny ranking factor. Google have officially & categorically stated that they no longer use keyword tags (they haven't for quiet some time). Your meta description tag should be used and well written as it will increase CTRs. Read my blog post: Why are META Tags Useful?