What I discovered was that Infoseek does not BAN your page entirely for having more than 3 repetitions of a keyword in your metatag. However, the pages I submitted with fewer repetitions in the meta tag (with all other elements the same), the higher the page scored! A page with 2 repetitions scored better than one with 3 repetitions, and one with just one mention of the keyword in the metatag, scored better than all the other meta tag test pages.

The page that ultimately came out on top was the one that was better balanced by having the keyword not only in the meta tag but also in the body text. Therefore, always remember that the meta tags play only one portion of Infoseek, or any engine's overall scoring system.

I also ran a test to see if there was in fact a limit that would ban the page or get the keyword ignored in a search. Despite the widely held belief of a "7 repetition limit", a page on Infoseek with 8 repetitions in a row of the word metasnafutest still showed up, although it ranked poorly. Nine repetitions though evidently was too much since InfoSeek failed to find that page on a search for metasnafutest. The page was still indexed though, since it did show up for another unique keyword search I did.

Therefore, my recommendation with InfoSeek remains largely the same as what I suggested last month. Repeat keywords throughout the page, but no more than three times in the KEYWORD meta tag.

I'd recommend you try repeating it once as lower case, once as upper case, and perhaps once as upper/lower case. I would not repeat it anymore than this, even in other forms of the same word such as "RUN" and "RUNNING". If you still have trouble achieving that optimal rank, consider listing your keyword only ONCE to avoid any small penalty that might make the difference between a good score and a mediocre one.

                 ← What is this?