Keyword Meta Tag

Over the past couple of weeks we’ve had a few questions regarding this topic, all of which have revolved around the role that the keywords meta tag plays in SEO.

The History of the Keywords Meta Tag

In the mid 1990′s and early 2000′s the keywords meta tag had a huge impact on where a website was positioned within search results. Because of this a lot of people used them and abused them by keyword stuffing, adding competitors company names, and even adding irrelevant terms, all in the hopes of ranking high for as many searches as possible. Due to this misuse search engines began reduced the importance that the keywords metadata had in determining the position of a website and eventually most of them stopped looking at it all together opting instead to use more complex algorithms to determine a web pages relevance.

In 2009 Matt Cutts, who is currently the head of Google’s Web-spam team, released a video on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, stating that Google does not use keywords for page ranking and that they hadn’t done so for a long time

Bing on the other hand does still look at the keyword meta tag, but as a spam signal for detecting low quality sites. What this means is that it won’t help a site rank any higher in a search, but it can make a site rank lower if the site is seen to be abusing the keywords meta tag tag by keyword stuffing.

Using Keywords Meta Tag

We aren’t discouraging the use of the keywords meta tag, as it can be useful on some website for other reasons. However their use will not help your website get higher up the search rankings in popular search engines.