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It's a pity he/she/they couldn't even get the structure of an HTML page right... thereby making the experiment completely useless.
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Dave, good eye, but I don't grasp your logic:
- META keywords tag is "malformed"
- TITLE and META element in the header is out of place.
- So Googlebot didn't index the page correctly.
Assuming Googlebot will choke on minor validation errors - That's a big leap of faith. Though I think WC3 validaton does have some merit (from what I've seen Googlebot sometimes fail to find the meat of a page if HTML is too convoluted) you're assuming that Googlebot will trip up on that META tag just because there are spaces between name, =, and "keywords." That's a big assumption.
A majority of websites have validaton errors. Some errors will trip up Googlebot, according to a googler:
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<meta name=description value=the best site for hot air balloons>
...which results in a meta element with eight attributes, and which doesn't help anyone (least of all the search engines it's aimed at, since the second attribute should have been content, not value, and therefore the entire element is likely to be ignored).
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http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/metadata.html
But in general, Googlers insist their bot is extremely flexible. I personally doubt that (they also said
they are "pretty good" at spotting duplicate content but then
wtf is this?) but I don't believe META tags out of order is enough to confuse the simplest of scripts. Their bot needs to be extremely forgiving, because otherwise it will fail to index 40% of the web:
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“40% of all html has syntax errors. and there’s no way search engines can remove 40% of its index, just because somebody didn’t validate.
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- Matt Cutts
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-an...-google-video/
Assuming Google choked on that test page due to META positioned ahead of the TITLE attribute (its not mine, btw), nothing should come up for words in the
TITLE attribute or
on-page text.
Anyway, here's another example:
http://www.britney.com/, which ranks #4 for "britney spears."
It's got Flash on the home page and no actual textual content (besides keywords in the TITLE).
Here's the META keywords tag:
<meta name="keywords" content="Kevin, Kevin Federline, Federline, fantasy, Britney spears foundation, B in the remix, mailing list, news, music video, Madonna, photos, pictures, photograph, buddy icon, icon, screen savger, digital music, ringtones, digital downloads, store, merchandise, newsletter, Justin timberlake, Christina Aguilera, me against the music , in the zone, the hook up, red zone, the matrix, shadow, Moby, early morning, Cathy Dennis, toxic, showdown, r. Kelly, outrageous, yin yang twins, (I got that) boom boom, everytime, guy sigsworth, early morning, mark taylor, touch of my hand, mmc, Mickey mouse club, n’sync, baby one more time, sometimes, (you drive me) crazy, crazy, oops! I did it again, stronger, don’t let me be the last to know, slave 4 you, slave for you, overprotected, “not a girl, not yet a woman,” crossroads, Lucy, Pepsi, Sean Preston, my prerogative, toxic, Sutton pierce, matt felker, everytime, boys, sometimes, outrageous, Mr. Britney, Mr. Britney Spears, mouseketeer, max martin, dream within a dream tour, Britney and Kevin: Chaotic, Britney & Kevin: chaotic, pop, urban pop, dance" />
Kevin federline
Kevin Federline (without quotes)
Britney spears foundation
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