Possibly prompted by a couple of cases in which the appearance or absence of words used in the meta keywords on a website’s tag has resulted in legal action, Google has recently reiterated its stance on the keywords meta tag.
Possibly prompted by a couple of cases in which the appearance or absence of words used in the meta keywords on a website’s tag has resulted in legal action, Google has recently reiterated its stance on the keywords meta tag in its Webmaster Central Blog (also in Matt Cutts’ blog). The key line is "Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking". This is echoed in a Google Webmaster video released to coincide with the aforementioned blog posts, in which Matt Cutts says "we really just don’t use this information at all".
You can’t get any plainer than that. This is old news, something that the majority of SEOs have known (or at least had a strong inkling about) since around the end of the 90s. The keyword tag became abused by unethical SEOs, who often stuffed the tag with hundreds of words or included words that the page had no content for, to the point where Google (amongst many other engines) just began to disregard it. The decline in use of the keyword meta tag by the search engines even prompted well-known SEO Danny Sullivan to declare its death all the way back in 2002.
So why bother using it at all? Well, whilst Google undoubtedly has the largest market share, it is not the only search engine. Whilst it is unlikely that any search engine gives the keyword tag any real weight when it comes to ranking, it can still be used for retrieval in some search engines. Both Bing and Yahoo! have published advice to use the keyword meta tag.
Best practice, if you are going to use the meta keywords tag, is to use it as was originally intended – to list words that are important to the contents of the page (this might include a few misspellings). Generally, we wouldn’t suggest doing this for all pages on a site unless it can be easily automated. The important things are not to overdo it, keeping to around about 8 words as a maximum, and to make sure that different pages don’t feature duplicate meta keywords tags. Don’t forget, however, that this isn’t going to have a significant benefit, and that you’re most likely to get better ROI in other areas.
Anders Online Marketing says:
September 26, 2009
I am working with marketing in Denmark and is searching for inspiration in the digital world. Thanks for inspiration