While it’s long been believed that Google stopped using the Meta Keyword tag as part of its formula for determining search result positioning, it’s now official. Key Google tech spokesperson Matt Cutts, writing on the Official Google Blog, recently confirmed that Google has not used the Meta Keyword tag “for years.”
Meta tags are pieces of HTML code which are hidden from view but can be accessed by the search engines when they index website pages. The Keywords tag has traditionally been on of the most-used HTML “Meta” tag. SEO experts have long believed that Google was not using this tag. But as far as I know, this is the first time Google has come out openly and confirmed this.
As to why Google does not use this tag, they gave the following explanation:
“About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, 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.”
In the Blog post, they also said that the Description Meta tag was only used “sometimes” to provide the description to a cataloged link. For a full description of this watch Cutts in this YouTube video.
In order to clarify their use of Meta tags in general, users are referred to a Google Webmaster Center page called Meta Tags. This provides those doing search engine optimization clarification as to how Google is using Meta tags to form its’ search engine ranking.
What About Yahoo?
Yahoo has long supported the Meta Keyword tag. However, at a recent event (SMX East in New York), Yahoo’s senior director of search stated that support for the tag “actually had been ended unannounced several months ago.”
However, a writer for Search Engine Land, a major SEO news source, wrote a few days later that he did a test that seemed to indicate that Yahoo WAS continuing to index the tag and he wrote an article about this.
Subsequently, Yahoo sent him this response:
“What changed with Yahoo’s ranking algorithms is that while we still index the meta keyword tag, the ranking importance given to meta keyword tags receives the lowest ranking signal in our system.
“Words that appear in any other part of documents, including the body, title, description, anchor text etc., will take priority in ranking the document – the re-occurrence of these words in the meta keyword tag will not help in boosting the signal for these words. Therefore, keyword stuffing in the keyword tag will not help a page’s recall or ranking, it will actually have less effect than introducing those same words in the body of the document, or any other section.
“However, when no other ranking signal is present, unique words that only appear in the meta keyword tag section of documents can still be used to recall these documents.”
What About Bing?
Most sources I have seen state that Bing does not support the Keyword tag. However, on the Bing Webmaster blog, the following direction is given for use of this tag in a July, 2009 post:
The Keyword tag “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.”
(You can read the whole post here.)
Not sure what to believe at this point. I did a bit of Web research and while a lot of folks are stating that Bing does not support this tag I was unable to find any authoritative answer.
In Summary
For those of us who get paid to do search engine optimization, we hope those of you who are our clients can being to appreciate from this saga about the Keywords tag how much of SEO is art as compared to Science!
Note that he does say they use keywords for Google’s “search appliance” and other search engines “may use” keywords. Also, keywords are used by a huge number of social media sites to automatically classify an article on your website or blog via “tags”. There are literally 10′s of thousands of websites that share information using these keywords, so I recommend keeping and using these on your web pages.
Note that the purpose of this video is to keep people from suing each other over keyword usage and this video is designed to reduce the involvement of Google in these law suits.
Also, we have found through split testing that Google actually ranks an article higher for a keyword search for a keyword that it is in the description and content. This may just be a residual effect from other sites’ indexing efforts but the effect is there none the less.