Google’s Search Quality Expert Matt Cutts has just explained a shocking truth about how Google ranks web sites on its main site – it does not consider keywords meta tag after all. In other words, whatever keywords meta tag you use, it will not affect how well you site will rank on a particular keywords on their respective Google SERPs.According to Matt, Google started disregarding keywords meta tags when webmasters started abusing its use. Particularly when many have started stuffing the keywords meta tag with irrelevant keywords even if the site does not really contain any information relating to those keywords.
The good news is that the other meta tags are not as unuseful as the keywords meta tags. The “description” meta tags for instance is being used by Google in displaying search results snippets for websites that are displayed on Google SERPs.
Anyway, if you have stuffed your websites keywords meta tag, you don’t really need to delete it as Matt says that Google might find it useful in the years to come. And besides, those keywords are used for other purposes than web site ranking on Google search, right?
heh heh
While it has long been quite well established that Google does not take into account the meta keywords tag, there are a number of people who say they’ve documented an advantage to using the meta keyword tag for better Yahoo! results.
Hi Arnold Zafra,
I agree what you said. Because meta tag contain the short information about the page content or service. Content of that is more important for ranking with respect to particular keyword.
“According to Matt, Google started disregarding keywords meta tags when webmasters started abusing its use.” So when was that? Most of us already know Google didn’t use these or had a least downgraded them to about zero as far as the serps in Google are concerned. But as metapilot says what value do they have in Yahoo and Bing?
Titles and meta tags helps a lot for getting ranking to your website easily. with out titles keywords your page not indexed in high competition keywords, If you are given quality keywords then your website indexed easily.
I guess I was surprised to hear that Google does not look at keywords, but what about Yahoo and Bing? According to recent SEJ article, 29% of users are using these search engines.
Seems like Google’s algorithm would be smart enough to detect keyword stuffing and penalize sites that do so. It is not hard to look at meta keywords and determine overuse of certain keywords and then to look for correlation between list and actual words used in page.
Glass Pendants – I agree that the traffic from Yahoo, MSN and Bing have traffic that merits Meta keywords that are considered intelligently. TIP: list without commas, don’t be repetitive and put your most important words first.
Most traffic comes from Google though. and, most Google traffic comes from organic listings on the page (not PPC ads).
I like that Google doesn’t us the Meta Keywords- doesn’t that mean more weight on relevance in their algorithm?
It has been known Google disregard meta keywords for a while now so nothing new there. Although Google do not use the keywords meta, it is still worth using them as best practise to optimise for other search engines that still use this data in their algorithms.
Mike
We can still optimize the website by adding meta keywords since Yahoo, Bing and other search engines may follow these meta keywords. If you want to optimize your website only for Google then follow their webmaster guidelines and optimize them accrdingly.
As far as meta keywords go I think they still have a value if they are put harmoniously with meta desriptions. Just by using keywords do not mean much in Serps. It is the sinergic value that counts. If all are used correctly (according to google standards) they can significantly help you get ahead.
Thanks, for useful info. It can guide me the SEO on my blog.
It may not help, but it’s good to keep it in there, since rules on SEO are constantly changing. Plus, as many people have noted, there are other search engines out there, so it’s good to supply those engines with relevant information about the content of your webpage.
If we restrict the conversation to META keywords then Google does not use them.
Yahoo will only use them if there are no other ranking signals that are stronger like page titles, headers, text, everything content related. Only then does Yahoo now use the META keyword info. They stated clearly recently that repeating keywords in the META keywords will NOT help rankings.
Bing appears to work in a similar fashion or at least places very little weight on META keywords.
Keyword use in the titles and other page content outside of META remains as important as before.
Its a good news that google may consider description for SERPs. Now websites should not use descrpition in a wrong way in order to increase thier rankings.