Wierd Keyword Stuffing Via Meta Http-equiv Options

[Andy1342]

My market is local, and my prime key phrase is just <myproduct, mycity>. So, if I google <myproduct city1>, <myproduct city2> etc I get lists of other people doing the same as me in other cities. I've been analyzing these.

Very very roughly, the sites right at the top are the oldest sites. But in one city, a newcomer leapfrogged over the older ones. I've spoken to him, and his SEO is very basic and simple, with no special links etc. The only really different thing about his site is that he has a wierd meta, like this:

<meta http-equiv="keyword1, keyword2, ..... keyword 20" content="keyword1, keyword2, ..... keyword 20">

I've never seen this before. Does it work? Is is trick worth using? Will Google penalise it (it obviously hasn't done so with him in the past 3 years.)

OK, OK I do realise that whatever it is, it is against the pure elevated spirit of organic SEO. But my motto is, GOT good site, GOT integrity, NEED ranking. So I don't feel bad about doing anything which works and won't get penalised.

Any explanations?

Regards

Andy

[qwerty]

I can't believe that's helping the site at all. It's probably being ignored.

[Jill]

Anyone can stuff keywords in any sort of meta tag that they want. It doesn't mean it's getting indexed by the search engines. That's not a tag they care about.

[chrishirst]

the http-equiv meta instruction is equivalent to a http header and is used to tell the client to override the same header sent by the server.

As there is no http header called "keyword1, keyword2, ..... keyword 20" it will be totally ignored by all standard user agents.

[Andy1342]

Many thanks for all these clear - and blessedly unanimous! - replies.
Andy