Meta Keywords Tag Ignored by Google
Now it’s official: Google ignores the Meta Keywords Tag for ranking. What many SEOs have suspected for quite a time has now officially been confirmed by Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team. In an interview published on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog he said: “Because the Keywords Meta Tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the Keywords Meta Tag.” The fact that Google doesn’t use the Meta Keywords for ranking, doesn’t mean they don’t index them – they actually do. But while processing the search query, Google will not look in the Meta Keywords Tags in contrast to the body text for matching terms, i.e.matching documents.
Meta Keywords Tag with Other Search Engines
Ok, so using Meta Keywords doesn’t help your website ranking on Google. What about other search engines? Danny Sullivan’s blog post called Meta Keywords 101 dated back to 2007 examines the issue further. After testing he came to the conclusion that while Google and Microsoft Live ignore the Keyword Meta data Tag completely, Yahoo and Ask don’t. Actually he ranked in both search engines for a matching term which could only be found in the test pages’ Keywords Meta Tag.
Meta Keywords Tag Recommendations
On the one hand, using the Meta Keywords Tag doesn’t harm you, so if it is feasible for your site then it’s still a good practice. Recommended are also to add misspellings of your key phrases to the Meta data. On the other hand filling in the gaps is a time consuming work and this time can surely be used more efficiently for other activities. Also have in mind that your competition can see instantly which Keywords you are targeting on each page. Not that this is very hard to determine using other tools, but at least you don’t hand it over to them on a plate!
Related posts:
