Meta Keywords Hold No SEO Value

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meta keyword devaluedThis is probably old news for many webmasters that keep up with SEO news, but I thought I would blog about it as I recently had a discussion with a friend about this. All major search engines claim that the meta keyword field holds little or no value in their search algorithms.

I still see webmasters putting up sites where they are spamming the hell out of the keyword meta tag even now. I love it. This, among many other factors that are readily apparent, tells me that my competition really does very little to keep up with what is happening in the industry.

As many of you reading this know full well, the business of search engine optimization is an ever changing one that requires diligent research and personal testing to verify what techniques and practices are actually effective.

Bing, yahoo, Google, and others have all publicly stated in no uncertain terms that the meta keyword field is useless for search engine optimization. If you still don’t believe me have a look at Matt Cutts telling you in his own words:

  • Yahoo announced at the SMX East in New York last October that they had not supported the meta keyword tag for some months.
  • Bing has never supported the keyword meta tag.

Many webmasters including BurnSEO have tested the keyword meta tag by creating a new site and only placing a token identifier in the meta tag. what did we find? Well the search engines to indeed index a site with only a keyword meta tag identifier and display it in their search results. Does this mean they are all lying to us and that the keyword meta tag is used in their search ranking algorithms? NO.

What it does tell us is that they do still index the content of the meta keyword field. In all likelihood this field is either A) not part of the hundreds of factors used in ranking a website or B) One of, if not the lowest ranking factor being used for website SERP ranking.

Do we still use the meta keyword tag? Yes. We it useful, since the tag does exist to still utilize the meta keyword field in a very minimal way. Since the field does exist and it is not (at least of the date this article was written) harming your website in anyway, then why not still utilize the field? Spamming this meta field is clearly a futile waste of a webmasters time, however responsibly utilizing an existing meta tag field seems to make perfect sense.

Clearly it’s far more important to know what keywords you are going after and to integrate those keyword into your sites navigation, content, and meta tags. Giving all of those keywords away in a devalued meta field may be something webmasters should think twice about, however.

We look forward to hearing any thoughts or findings you may have on the topic.


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  • jillwhalen

    I'm confused. Are you saying that you've seen evidence of Google indexing your meta keywords tag?

    Because every test I've ever done has shown that it's completely ignored and not indexed by Google.

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  • http://www.searchengineoptimizationx.com jonathonhewitt

    You bring up some highly valid points in your article. To bring up an interesting point of view that many people may not have ever considered; What if Google was just like the government and only told you what they wanted you to hear? And led you to believe exactly what they wanted you to believe? After all they do try to keep webmasters from figuring out their algorithms so as not to duplicate it. I personally do not believe that meta tags are a highly important ranking factor especially in a search using one of the Big 3, but…

    1) What if Google DOES use meta tags to rank websites and has placed Matt Cutts in a convincing video about the topic to try to cut down on the amount of “spam” that is in the average websites meta keywords?

    2) Would Google lie to us??

    3) Would Google leading people to believe that meta tags don't help SEO change their habits when choosing their keywords? (example: amount of keywords, choice of keywords hence: Less Spam)

    Due to the fact that Google DOES index your meta keywords and the fact that it cannot hurt you to have relevant keywords in your meta tags on top of the fact that their are thousands of other search engines out their and some of the more basic ones may rely on meta tags, that is why I choose to place approximately 10 of the 30 allowed meta tags into my website's.

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  • http://www.pinnacleplans.com DeMarcus Riley

    I agree that meta tags have little value, but it's a habit. I still include the main keyword(s) in the meta tag field when adding new content to my sites.

  • http://www.philippinesvirtualassistants.com Virtual Assistants

    Google programmers are lazy or overpaid :) Yes keywords are used by spammers but it can also be a resource for proper keyword identification … But instead of creating a good algorithm to detect spam from legit they dropped it.