1. Are the meta tags really working? which search engines actually use them?
2. Do i have to declare description and abstract meta tags in every page? and What are the differences between them?
3. Can Keywords be the same across all pages?
4. What exactly is the content that should come inside a copyright meta tag? (I use the name of the site and a full URL with the path to the "Legal Advice" or something)
5. Language meta tag for spanish from mexico is just "es"?
6. What are the most common and recomendable meta tags that we must try to include in our sites?

These are what i use:

a) http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"
http-equiv="Content-Language"
c) "language"
d) title
e) description
f) abstract
g) keywords
h) revisit
i) owner
j) generator
x) rating
y) distribution
z) copyright

In that order (i know it doesnt have to do but i like 'grouping' sets of meta tags to have them in a personal way that helps me understand them faster across the sites i develop, or something like that (have some one found a better way to classify them)?

Thanks in advance...

Hmmmm, meta tags are handy, especially for the search engines which actually do use them. However, there's an increasing numbers of search engines which no longer use them. I've heard that google doesn't use these anymore (it may have been posted on a similar thread on this website.)

IF you do use meta tags, you willl have a more advanced description of your website on the search engine's server, meaning that you kinda filter the search results and hence get more traffic.

That about google may not have been right, but I'm sure it is. Hope this helps nevertheless.

err, i didnt quite understand that... you are sure it is what? that google isnt using it any more?

Thanks, i do know everything you said about meta tags, but i didnt actually find an answer to any of my questions (what i asked was which search engines are using meta tags to filter and organize their databases).

Thanks!

Umm, I´m very interested in this too. I thought google uses it but it seems like no one has really an exact idea of how Google indexes really, so I don´t know. I didn´t even know that there were so many different tags. Maybe someone wise enough could do a tutorial about this...

Actualy google is one of the few search engins we can know everything about. They recently filed for a patent, which means a search as the US pattent office will yeild a very detailed description of how google works. I believe I heard the same thing about google not using them. Mainly because they are to easy to manipulate. If I know that the most searched term on google is Free Beer (just an example) and I want my site to get more hits, (it by the way is about the evils of gambling, because I am a chirch group, again just an example) I could use meta tags and say that my site is about free beer, thus increasing it's rank among people looking for free beer, and then getting more hits, even though my site isn't about free beer at all, understand?

From this site:

I believe robots are used to both index or not indexing your pages am i wrong? As far as i know the possible values are:

index, follow
no index, no follow
index, no follow
no index, follow

all
none

In fact there are just two values: index and follow, and you can turn them on or off.

Index is for appending that page to the search engines database, and follow is for seeking the links it finds on the page, and indexing those pages to its DB.

The reason why people use meta tags is because they want to be found on search engines. They dont get you to the top of search engines thought you have to pay for that. I have had people ask me if thats how they get to the top. No its not, it just puts on their search engines. So that when something in the tags is searched it pops up. Although i do recommend using them. That way if someone does stumble upon your site and likes it they will reccommend it to everyone they know . And bam you get more traffic. Which is nice. But like i said Meta Tags are only for getting you on search engines.