Can anyone understand why Google Rankings have gone?

Hi all,

Someone called me the other day wanted advice for their site. Their site was ranked for a selection of keywords throughout the site (all low competition) and they paid a web company a small amount of money to help them get better rankings.

However...you get what you pay for...and this company added the following tags to their top level pages:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="VW96.OBJECT TYPE" CONTENT="Document">
<META NAME="RATING" CONTENT="General">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="index,follow">
<META NAME="REVISIT-AFTER" CONTENT="7 days">

Now I understand what the bottom 2 mean, but not the top 2 - what are the top 2 tags?

Once this web company added the tags my friend complained that his rankings depleted and he lost all his rankings; his pages are still all 'listed' in Google though, so it's not sandboxed.

On top of this he uses Google webmaster tools and has submitted a sitemap.xml file there.

My guess on what happened is that somehow these tags have confused the spiders and has meant the site is not gettiong ranked for its keywords - has anybody else got any ideas.

Thanks in advance.

Misch

 

Explanation of the meta tags can be found here:

http://www.html-reference.com/META.htm

 

you dont need any of those tags.

You need to see if google have visited the site recently, in your logs.

What else did this company do?

When you say depleted, does that mean drop a little or fall off totally?