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Do the spiders for various engines work differently?

In April my daughter launched a business website. We were advised that metatags weren't necessarily important because the spiders looked more at actual page content to determine a site's real purpose. It was suggested to leave the metatags blank and see what happens organically.

I just did some checking using Bing, Google, Yahoo, Lycos, Altavista and Dogpile.

When I searched using my daughter's name she came up on the first page of all engines, usually as the first name and, on some, more than once on the first page.

When I searched using the name of the city and the generic name of the kind of business, it was page one on all except Google which was page 4. This is an improvement because it used to be page 6 but just seems strange that it's lagging.

Should we be doing something with metatags?

ryck

some of this is a bit cloak-and-dagger because sites like google don't want you to rig your page to get a higher ranking.

From what I've read from google, the most important factor for pagerank is how many pages link TO your page.

We see this abused from time to time where some astroturfers attempts to spam a url all over the place randomly to increase the site's pagerank,

Re: "some of this is a bit cloak-and-dagger because sites like google don't want you to rig your page to get a higher ranking."

That would be consistent with the reason we were told that the metatags might not be effective.

We were advised it was because some sites, particularly porn sites, would enter a lot of words totally unrelated to what they actually did in order to drive 'accidental' traffic to their sites. As a result the spiders were set up to disregard most meta information and rely more on the words of the text on the pages themselves.

Re: "....the most important factor for pagerank is how many pages link TO your page."

Thanks. Now I understand why the two searches get different results. My daughter also writes newspaper columns related to the business she's in and the papers put her columns on-line, with her website URL in the byline. The byline doesn't include her home city.

ryck

Yep, that's exactly right.

Google specifically says they do not look at meta tags and do not pay any attention to any keywords found in meta tags. Yahoo does likewise.

We live in a world filled with dishonest people. Because of that, the search engines can't consider information that you supply when determining the page rankings, because if they did, those dishonest people would game the system.



Bingo again.

We live in a world filled with dishonest people. Because of that, the search engines can't consider information that you supply when determining the page rankings, because if they did, those dishonest people would game the system.

and of course the irony here is that's the reason the tags were created in the first place. I wonder if anyone at the committee raised a hand and said "but what if...?"