The Meta keyword tag was Yahoo’s primary factor for search. This is how Yahoo and other search engines knew what your website was about.
Yahoo has removed the use of the tag from its ranking algorithm. The news came during the Ask The Search Engines session at SMX East in New York today.
Yahoo was the only major search engine who actually supported the meta keyword tag. Cris Pierry, senior director of search at Yahoo explained that support actually had been ended unannounced “several” months ago.
Google and Bing do not support the meta keyword tag. In fact, Google has never supported it. The keywords meta tag has no impact whatsoever on how Google’s search engine ranks pages. None. Zilch. Nada according to search engine land. You can read the entire article here.
From the Google Blog – “Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword meta tags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.”
Say goodbye to meta! You will be missed.
I’m not sure that Google *never* supported meta keywords, are you sure that’s the case? I know that they recently announced “basically not at all”, when asked how much they use the meta keywords tag.
Either way – it’s good that we now know that the 3 major search engines no longer support it, officially.
Klaus,
Never ever did Google support the keyword meta tag.
That’s not exactly what Matt Cutts believes, I’m afraid :)
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
“Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.”
I guess they can’t begin to disregard it, if they’ve never supported it, if you know what I mean :)
Klaus,
All in all, they never supported it regardless. Thanks for the feedback!
Thanks for the heads up, Frank.
It is important to know these things and I count on you for a lot of information.
Bunny,
Thanks for the encouragement. I try to stay on top of all tech news, but it’s a big challenge. I am glad to catch what I can.
I think it’s a good thing meta keyword tags are now being disregarded – one less job for a web designer to do!
I take it page title and meta descriptions are still of value though?
Luke,
Title tags are very important. The description tag is losing its value, but many webmaster still feel it’s necessary. I am not one of those webmasters.
However, this link speaks for itself:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=a6l0j8f6jg9l30s12ew6nun9kr21qxe0
Great catch Carla! I’ll have to watch this search over the next few months and see if it drops out…