Arghhh, rant time :|

So yesterday I completed a database migration of 167,000 products from an old ecommerce system to a new one. Everything was brought over, orders, customer addresses, everything, really chuffed :)

The only thing the client picked up on was the lack of his spammy "meta keywords" data that I intentionally did not import. I mean the tag isn't used and a list of 40 comma separated random words you'd like to rank for isn;t going to help the sites SEO on bit.

Anyway, the client is now moaning a lot and insisting I add them in. Even after I explained that the meta keywords is gone for good reasons he insists on keeping the data.

Soooo, pointless :|

(note the tags for the sake of satire :) )

I did a similar migration once, from a static website to a CMS (some 8000+ web pages) it has some decent SEO and although we knew the tags were pretty useless as far as SEO goes, we went ahead migrating them anyway. The site ended up getting a boost from google.

We did the same thing for a smaller site that got about the same amount of traffic, but the developer working on that one forgot to migrate the tags (got everything else, including pretty much the same markup). The site tanked after that because even though the tags didn't give any direct SEO value, it was a way that the page was "fingerprinted", so when they were removed, Google and others thought they were new pages and decided to knock them down a bit because the content had changed too much.

Black Magic, all of it

@tytho that's an interesting result... Never seen that happen

@tytho yer, never seen that happen either . The meta keywords tags on this s site are spammed to the max :)

Chuffed: British detected