I don't see why this is getting downvoted.  Traditionally Google does make corrections after a significant update.  The website in question is still receiving traffic and isn't completely out of the index, and could very well see the rankings go back in a week or two.

If you panic and start making site changes immediately, you may not know what the cause of the problem was.  If you go and change title tags, remove some spammy looking links, change the anchor text and a handful of other things you would not know which was effective and which wasn't.

It's like pulling your goalie in hockey after going down 2-0 in the first 5 minutes.  Let the updates play themselves out for a week or two and go from there.

I don't think a lot of visitors are gonna look into that stuff as much as SEOs would.  They might see the plugin on the homepage that has a like button, and see that it shows 500+ or whatever and say "hmm I guess they have some loyal customers".  Granted some may check the actual facebook page (as opposed to the website likes) to see about coupons and specials.

Some people may be dubious.  I don't know what my official stance would be on doing the likes or not, but I think the numbers would still be more of a benefit than a detriment.

I see only one real benefit to ordering 1000 facebook likes.  They won't be targeted, and won't generate any leads.

What they can lead to is more people liking your facebook page, or making it look like you have more credibility.  Would you be more inclined to buy from or like a site that has 12 facebook likes, or 1012?  Google may crawl those likes and see they are rubbish, but the average consumer or visitor wouldn't.  You may not get a boost in the rankings with fake social signals, but it could lead to more genuine social signals.

Cheers,

Vinnie

If he put the image within the h1, and set the alt text to what he wanted the H1 would that help?  It wouldn't be ideal but it could be a workaround that would yield some results.

I agree the design should encompass the proper tags, especially the H1 and H2.

One of the main reasons they stopped looking at them is because it was easy to spam and stuff the tags.  Any site can easily stuff the meta tags, so it's an unreliable ranking factor.

A few years back it was beneficial for when directories/info sites would scrape your site.  When they list your site they would use those keywords for categories, and possibly even anchor text.  You don't see it as much anymore, especially since that scraped information is just junk content.

The way I see it, it can hurt your site to have the KWs.  Your competitors can easily see what keywords you are going after (which they probably can anyway by looking at a given page).  Giving them one spot to check on every page though will make it much easier for them to benefit from your keyword research.

Some people like to use meta tags as product tags on their site.  So if you search for "black cats" on a cat website, anything with the meta tag black cats would come up first.  It also works for when you want to make a black cat page that features every single black cat related item on your site.  Of course, you can just do internal tagging for this, and don't need to use the meta tags.

Moral of the story: not much use for them.

Does anyone else have anything to add?  I'd love to see a few examples of pages that make use of the tags and how they are doing in the search engines.  I certainly understand if you don't want to share your specific pages though.

Thanks for the input.  I agree with you about the strength of the site, as well as the pages.  I might give it a try on a small sample of pages and see if it helps conversions or impacts SEO at all.

Vinnie

I've been reading about the proper use for block quotes and citations lately, and wanted to see if I was interpreting it the right way.  This is what I read:

http://www.pitstopmedia.com/sem/blockquote-cite-q-tags-seo

So basically my question is, if I wanted to reference Amazon or another stores product reviews, could I use the block quote and citation tags around their content so it doesn't look like duplicate content?  I think it would be great for my visitors, but also to the source as I am giving them credit.  It would also be a good source to link to on my products pages, as I am not competing with the manufacturer for sales.  I could also do this for product information right from the manufacturer.

I want to do this for a contact lens site.  I'd like to use Acuvue's reviews from their website, as well as some of their product descriptions.  Of course I have my own user reviews and content for each product on my website, but I think some official copy could do well.

Would this be the best method?  Is this how Rottentomatoes.com does it?  On every movie page they have 2-3 sentences from 50 or so reviews, and not much unique content of their own.

Cheers,

Vinnie