Most of the submissions will give you a link with attribute rel set to nofollow - and these don't really give you any SEO benefit, so it is quite important to first check the other listings and see whether they have this attribute and value assigned to the anchor - if so, then the only benefit you will get is the visit if someone actually clicks on the link in the listing and gets to your site.

I think you're right - if we can't find a reason for using them, best to ignore / remove it altogether.

Here are a few guides on how you can do it:

http://www.studentscrunch.com/2012/03/how-to-add-meta-tags-to-blogger-blogger.html#

http://www.bloggertricks.com/2007/12/adding-meta-tags-to-bloggerblogspot.html

Unfortunately Blogger doesn't provide the tools to do it using any specific interface, so you will have to simply paste the tags into the html.

If they follow then you could also check:

• whether the directory actually has some ranking already and has been around for a while

• how many links they usually put on one page before paging to the next one

• check if the listing pages of the recently added entries (usually last ones) are already in Google index - I normally do it by checking their PageRank - if it's at least white (I use Quirk SearchStatus plugin for Firefox) that means Google is already aware of them - which indicates that they crawl this directory pretty frequently for new content / pages

• try to perform a search on Google for a specific keyword - the category you want to submit your link to and see what's their position for it

Obviously you would do all this if you had a lot of time to go through each directory separately, but it might be worth wile if you're planning to get some links in the different way then the generic links from the visitors.

The first meta tag refers to the Internet Explorer - you can read about it a bit more here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2008/06/10/introducing-ie-emulateie7.aspx

The other meta tags are referring to the size of the view port - based on the condition whether the device that is used to preview the page is a mobile device or not.

You can also see the meta title and description tags:

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

Meta description is wrapped with the conditional statement.

My suggestion would be to remove these lines:

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

And place your standard meta title and description above:

Hopefully this should solve your problem.