Paul Sturgess

Google does not use the keywords meta tag

The majority of the web industry had, over time, come to the consensus that the keywords meta tag is not used by Google in ranking web search results. However, we’d never heard it from Google itself; that is until now.

Recently on the official Google blog they posted an article on just this issue and clearly stated that they do not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.

It’s worth pointing out that while this is only Google and other search engines may well use the meta keyword tags, it only serves to enforce our own approach to search engine optimisation that meaningful content is key.

 

Tags: google, seo, search

Comments: 3

gav
commented on

Mmmm... not sure I believe this, but seeing as Google will never release the full algorithm I guess we'll never know. Let's do some tests and find out!

Robin
commented on

In my opinion, keywords are cargo-cult SEO at its greatest. SEOMoz are well respected among to community of white-hat SEOs and their CEO has this to say about meta keywords:

"http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization":http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization

“Yahoo! is unique among the search engines in recording and utilizing the meta keyword tag for discovery, though not technically for rankings. However, with Microsoft's Bing set to take over Yahoo! Search, the last remaining reason to employ the tag is now gone. That, combined with the danger of using keywords there for competitive research means that at SEOmoz, we never recommend employing the tag.”

gav
commented on

@Robin even if that's true (like I say I have my doubts) it seems a bit facile to ignore Yahoo just because of the rise in popularity of Bing!

Still, as Paul quite rightly points out targetted, meaningful content is the key to good SEO — The rest is noise.

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