But this is hardly breaking news. Most SEO experts have been in agreement for a long time now that the keywords meta tag doesn’t really have much significance when it comes to on-page SEO, especially when it comes to Google.
Today, Google has made it official. The Google blog announced that “Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.”
For most of us, this doesn’t really change anything. Google were disregarding meta keywords for a long time now as part of their efforts to prevent spam and attempts at gaming the system.
The Google blog explains, “keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.”
But if you ever come across an SEO expert that wants to include a long list of keyword meta tags on your website or blog, and insists that these are really important, it means they are not completely up to date and perhaps you should educate them.
Of course, since Bing’s market share is growing rapidly, and as far as we know the Bing search engine does not completely disregard keyword meta tags, it probably can’t hurt to include them on your web page anyway, as long as you are not stuffing irrelevant keywords into the page.
According to a recent entry on the Bing blog, “The tag’s keyword attribute is not the page rank panacea it once was back in the prehistoric days of Internet search. It was abused far too much and lost most of its cachet. But there’s no need to ignore the tag. Take advantage of all legitimate opportunities to score keyword credit, even when the payoff is relatively low. Fill in this tag’s text with relevant keywords and phrases that describe that page’s content.”
Bottom line: if your SEO efforts are only directed at Google, forget the keyword meta tag. But if you’re aiming at other search engines, namely Bing (which is prudent in my opinion), it does make sense to keep using the keyword meta tag – legitimately.
I'm Vered, a blogger for hire and social media consultant. I create and implement social media campaigns for my clients, with the goals of increasing brand awareness and loyalty, improving search engine rankings and driving targeted traffic to my clients' websites.
