How does the use of Dynamic meta tags effect SEO?

[BbeS]

I'm evaluating a new client site which was built buy another design firm. My question is they are dynamically creating meta tags and I'm concerned that it is hurting their SEO. When I view the page source this is what I see.

<meta name="<a class="attribute-value">keywords</a>" id="<a class="attribute-value">keywordsGoHere</a>" content="" /> <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" id="<a class="attribute-value">descriptionGoesHere</a>" content="" />
<title id="<a class="attribute-value">titleGoesHere</a>">title>

To me it looks like the tags are not being added to the page, however the title is showing when you view it in a browser and if use a spider view tool, it sees the title. I'm guess it is being called from a DB. So I'm a little concerned though that the search engines are not really seeing the title and description. I'm not worried about the keywords tag.

Can anyone shed some light on how this might work? Why it might not being showing the text for the description in the page code and if that will hurt SEO?

Thanks for the help!

[Chris.Menke]

Bryan,

If you go to google's cached version of one of those and don't see a title or description in the source code then for sure google isn't seeing it.   In that case, Google will create it's own meta date for the page based on the page's content.  While this isn't actually  the worst case scenario, (creating bad meta data yourself would be the worse case), it means that you're giving control of that data to the search engines and not being specific in what you want the page to rank for or how you want to present the snippet to the visitor.

[Schwaab]

If the content is generated before the page is served to users and search engines they will see it like any other page.  Check out the source code of the page, if the content is in there you are fine.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Go to GWT > Crawl > Fetch as Google and enter the URL you wish you spider. If the results come back and you see the meta info as it should be, then there shouldn't be a problem.

Also, I recommend removing meta keywords. They don't help SEO in any way and can be used by competitors for keyword research.