Google might omit meta tags, but including them doesn't really cost you anything. Other search engines still do take account of meta tags, so why throw away a small amount of potential visitors by not including them?
Getting high in Google is about getting links in to your site. The more, better quality sites that link to your site, the higher you'll find your site in Google's rankings. Anchor text is massively important with this.
If he removed the title tags then yes, that would severely hinder its ranking with Google.. Title tag is a key indicator of page content.
And a site linking to quality sites is the wrong way round. We are saying if you want to get higher you need high quality inbound links. So people linking to you from their amazing websites.
Also how do you work your way up the listings?? is it the more hits you have or somthing??
we have put the Tags back in the header.php would we now need to resubmit site ??
having links to other sites has no gain at all ?? I assumed it would as it was anchor text??
I was also thinking, could it be just that it was a freshbot that trawled the site and we need to wait for a deep search to be done to get permanent listing??
thanks for the help really appreciated