Sometimes I seriously wonder where some of these SEO theories come from. One that caught my eye this week was found in a Google Webmaster Help thread, asking if it can hurt your SEO efforts if you do not alphabetize your META tags.
The thread creator wrote:
Can anyone tell me if it hurts indexing sites that the meta tags have been alphabetized?But my editor tends to alphabetize them.
This webmaster asked a valid question. Since his web editor went through the trouble of making the tags in alphabetical order, should he do the same manually? The answer is no, it doesn't help in any way.
ZydoSEO replied to the thread, in which a Googler confirmed, saying:
The meta tags can appear in any order as long as they are contained inside the <head> element. It is not a problem to alphabetize them from Google's perspective... Only possibly from your perspective since time could probably be better spent doing something other than alphabetizing HTML elements.
In any event, I thought it would be fun to share this with many of the readers here.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.