Surely this cannot be a good SEO technique?

[Caro-O]

I have a client whose competitor has great positions in Google, and a quick look at the meta data revealed this (I removed the company name):

I'd love some opinions on this. My gut feel tells me this is spammy. But all my client sees is that this site is on page 1!

~Caro

[BradsDeals]

This looks to me like someone who knows SEO is important but has no idea what they're doing. Russ is right, superfluous meta tags haven't worked for nearly 10 years, if they ever did at all.

[Deacyde]

So far in my experiences, backlinks especially quality ones are a piece of the SEO golden ticket, closer to a full ticket you piece together, the closer to page 1 you get.

Funnier thing is, backlinks are also some of the hardest to achieve SEO wise, even more so in niche industries where even your competition ranking page 1 has blog comments as backlinks, I'm not ditching blog comments, however they really aren't providing much usefulness to your site's user's.

I'm willing to bet this domain is doing just enough SEO that when combined with the backlinks they have, means they get the SERP results they want.

If your SEO is on point, focus on a effective backlink campaign. It's still the closest thing SEOs have that works well for short game, long game is always content that even your high school teachers couldn't say wrong about.

[Caro-O]

Thank you Russ. The site does have some quality backlinks, yet ironically, it doesn't even have a Meta Description.

The SEO company has also included an Author meta tag with a link back to themselves.

[rjonesx. 0]

Google likely ignores all of these meta tags. They are most certainly not providing any meaningful rankings improvements for the competitor's site. That being said, they are clearly paying attention to SEO (why would they add superfluous tags unless they thought it was one more thing they could do to improve rankings). I would spend some time looking more into their backlinks and content quality/quantity.