Myth: The Meta Keyword tag is crucial to my site’s rankings

Truth: Not only is it not crucial, it’s of little, if any, importance

I’m sure some of you are shaking your heads right now, but my statement is in fact, verifiable.

In 2002 Google announced that they would stop considering the contents of the Keyword meta-tag. All of the other major search engines followed suit shortly after. The last engine I know of to still recognize it was AltaVista, which is now owned by Yahoo.

I beleive the main reason for this change was to put a stop to “keyword stuffing” which was rampant at the time. Keyword stuffing was the act of putting keywords unrelated to the content of the site in order to ‘trick’ or deceive the search robots.

I know that many marketers, webmasters and site owners still spend valuable time trying to fill their keywords tag with the perfect list of words and phrases. Hopefully bringing this to your attention will allow you to spend that time elsewhere.

I personally still include this tag on most my own, older sites, partially because I just can’t be bothered to remove them, but I’ve been leaving it out of the coding of new sites and have seen no negative effect to successful indexing and ranking.

If you wish to continue to use this tag, I would simply suggest you spend only a few minutes putting 10-20 keywords most important to your site into the tag, and then move on to more useful projects.

It hasn’t been shown to hurt your ability to be indexed, or achieve high rankings, as long as you don’t “keyword stuff”. I have read in several blogs the belief that Google will still penalize you if you fill this tag with garbage like “buy viagra” 20 or 30 times.

Here are a few external references on this subject:

From the Official Google Webmaster Blog:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/answering-more-popular-picks-meta-tags.html

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_tags#The_keywords_attribute

SearchEngineWatch.com: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167931

You can also Google “keyword meta tag use” to find many more sites, debate and discussion about this subject.