RadarFarms Press

As everybody who is involved in SEO even a little bit knows - keyword meta tags aren’t like they used to be.

There is so much was written about rise and demise of this particular meta tag for increasing Search Engine Rankings. The best opus on this subject, IMHO, was Meta Keywords Tag 101: How To “Legally” Hide Words On Your Pages For Search Engines.

As we always boasted, we never been involved in SEO of any kind and even launched anti-SEO radar SEO - Myths and Truth.

However, after we migrated to WordPress platform for our new site, we have been penalized by mighty Google both in terms of indexing of our new radars and quality of served AdSense ads.

We tried several tricks recommended by Google and bloggers but to no avail. Eventually, we resorted to good ol’ keyword meta tags by writting a stored procedure that automatically injected tags from radar’s Tag Clouds into keyword metatag for a page hosting it. We didn’t pin too many hopes on a quick exit from Google Sandbox but rather hoped that Yahoo and other guys will bring us a bit more traffic and quality of AdSense ads will improve (the keyword meta tags still could influence AdSense).

Then we compared our AdSense KPIs before and after the Tag Cloud tag injection into the radar’s keyword meta tags, which happen by EOD on 02/07 and results are very impressive to say at least:

Number of daily impressions (which is also the site traffic indicator) went up from 637 to 789 (24% increase).

Daily CTR went up from 1.08% to 1.8% (67%)

Daily eCPM (average payout of served ads) went up from $2.51 to $4.60 (83% increase).

We also digged into GA and compared the site KPIs for 01/28-02/07 (they are marked as pervious) to 02/08-02/18 (they are in bold):

9,477 Visits

Previous: 6,534 (+45.04%)

14,426 Pageviews

Previous: 11,847 (+21.77%)

1.52 Pages/Visit

Previous: 1.81 (-16.05%)

72.09% Bounce Rate

Previous: 57.90% (+24.51%)

00:00:46 Avg. Time on Site

Previous: 00:01:03 (-26.38%)

92.56% % New Visits

Previous: 90.80% (+1.94%)

Impact on traffic directed from Search Engines was even more stunning - 309.9% increase:

Google visits were up from 1,255 to 5,268 (320%), Yahoo visits increased from 51 to 168 (230%) and AOL traffic went up from 19 to 63 (232%).

Below is percentage of traffic originated from Search Engines and, as we anticipated, non-Google SEs increased their share:

While this result is not completely surprising, quantitive impact is what really surpised us. It means that rumours about the keyword meta tags greatly exaggerated!