biggies dont care.
some smaller ones do.

yes dani, goggle really does need them
/me points to adsense
it helps to determin the content of the adsense ad's belive it or not.

i would leave them there :)

If they exist, then leave them. Otherwise, I don't think you should bother too much about them.

I haven't seen a successful web site without them, so I highly recommend them. As long as you don't have a megabyte of pure metatags it should be ok. Company sometimes abuse the heck out of them and spiders don't even bother to crawl them because they see the abuse.

I haven't seen a successful web site without them, so I highly recommend them. As long as you don't have a megabyte of pure metatags it should be ok. Company sometimes abuse the heck out of them and spiders don't even bother to crawl them because they see the abuse.

You get moved down if your keywords are way too generalized (like this website having keywords such as "computers,tech,animals,food,pie,simpsons" you get the point :p

Every successful site that I've seen has used general keywords one time or another. In the long run, I don't recommend you ignoring generalized keywords.

Personally I put them on, for a few moments work you get 100s of smaller searchengines able to search your site

Yes, meta tags are very important for a site. The place where people mess up most frequently is in the content of the site and the keywords tag. Basically, find words in your site's content that appear frequently, pertain to the subject of your site, and make for decient keywords. Use those in the meta tag for keywords and Google will bless you for it.

Bear in mind that this may not be the case for all search engine's, but we all know the importance of Google PR, now don't we? :D

Meta-tags don't appear to be a big concern with Google but Yahoo and MSN and other Ink based spiders like them. Always worth using them as a basic SEO policy.

Meta-tags are not of great concern nowadays for SEO purposes. HOWEVER, on saying that, there is still some real value to their use for Inktomi-based systems, such as MSN and Yahoo.

If you want to see whether any search engine uses meta-tags for direct ranking purposes, then you can test this here:
http://www.seo-lab.com/seo-lab-tests/meta-tags/

Once again, I will say, they are also important for the all-knowing, all-seeing Google. Not in the tag itself, but in that Google uses it as a way of looking to see if your claims on a meta tag are realevant to the site. They use the words in the keywords tag to search the site and see if that's really what you content is based on. Check to see if it's a valid site for those keywords...if it is, they use it. Smart if you ask me.

Google stopped meta tags in SEO. I think Bing is using meta tags.