The only change I can fathom I made to my site in the past few weeks is I changed my revisit META to 7 days instead of 3 days. And my rank was steady in the top ten for most of my keywords for the past month, and it just suddenly jumped to pathetic ranking. Would this make a difference? Can it possibly?
No I doubt it. But, then again search engines like fresh content and your telling them not to come back but once a week. Maybe they feel rejected
As far as I know, this is an outdated and ignored meta tag. IF it worked, as mdvaldosta says, it is a LIMITER - it doesn't say "come back in 7 days" but rather "don't come back for at least 7 days because nothing here is going to change any way". No. PageRank is a measure of the number and quality of backlinks to a page, not number of Googlebot visits to your site.
Minstrel is on the mark I think. Old, outdated and ignored; and as such, it is merely taking up a few bits of space. Along the lines of "what ifs" another possibility is that you're telling bots to return weekly - what if you've not updated and now you've put out the welcome mat and you're not ready for guests? In all sincerity, the bots will come and go as they please generally. Google is develop a pattern based on how often it finds a new link or new content ... they'll do what they want, how they want and when they want regardless of an out-dated, ignored meta tag. Did it affect your rankings - no.
I just gave it a try, and changing it down to 3 days instead of 7 seems to have made a significant change....
Another example of superstitious behavior, I'm afraid. Just delete the tag. At best, it does no good. If it's even read, it may hurt you. Googlebot visits my sites daily. Why would you want to include an instruction that, if obeyed, says, "Don't come every day. Don't come back for at least 3 days."?
Consider that one deleted.... I still can't believe it's not helpful in any way. Like if Google comes once every week, and I say 1 day, telling it to come sooner, might make it so? I know it wouldn't probably obey, but still....
It's obsolete. And previously it was intended as a limiter to reduce the frequency of spidering. I suppose the modern equivalent could be the last-modified element (or whatever it's called) in the Google sitemap.
I see. It'd only help based on the assumption people actually want to volunteer to have their site crawled less often.