Meta Keywords Tag Finally Dead. This Time For Real!
October 7th, 2009
After Matt Cutts had announced officially a few weeks ago that Google ignores the meta keywords tag for ranking search results now follows Yahoo!. During the “Ask The Search Engines session” at SMX East in New York, Cris Pierry, senior director of search at Yahoo! admitted that Yahoo! does not use the meta keyword tags anymore.
All Major Search Engines Ignore Meta Keywords
The fact that all major Search Engines officially ignore meta keywords for ranking results should finally convince most of the website owners and SEOs who still persist in using the keyword meta tags that – seven years after Danny Sullivan’s post titled “Death of a Meta Tag” – it looks as if the time has come.
Ignored by Google, Yahoo and Bing the Keyword Meta Tag can actually be declared dead!
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Categories: Yahoo
Not so sure that yahoo do really ignore them.
This term is only in my keywords part of the site, and still does show up in yahoo, while it doesn’t show up in Google and Bing
See http://bit.ly/1dysD0
JaapWillem´s last blog ..Typical Amsterdam City landscape
@JaapWillem
Jaap I know these stories. There is a pretty good article on Search Engine Land about it, though it is from 2007: http://bit.ly/1a3ne8
I personally think including Meta Keywords is not worth the effort. And obviously you give away to the competition what keywords you are exactly targeting. And with Yahoo Search being powered by Bing, I think the future is not bright for the meta keywords – with a good reason
Andreas, I know and I hope that they will be killed sooner then later but the problem is as long as they work for Yahoo, there will always be this discussion.
I hope they will kill the whole option, as well in Dreamweaver, so it’s more obvious.. You know, some webmasters and Web creators don’t recognize a cow even though it’s standing on their feet.
@Andreas Pfister
What about other new search engines like Cuill and Exalead?
@Singapore SEO Consultant In Malaysia
Good Point. We don’t like to be ignorant towards other search engines but Cuil and Exalead have a very a small search market share and both of them couldn’t gain any more traffic over the last few months if we trust Compete (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/cuil.com+exalead.com/?metric=sess&months=12).
Of course each country/region has its search engine preferences. Therefore in some regions it might be interesting to optimize for these minor search engines.
Personally I don’t know how much or if at all meta keywords influence the ranking in Cuil and Exalead. This is definitely of interest and I’d be glad to hear more about it.