Official: Google Doesn’t Care about META Keywords
The SEO community is buzzing with Google’s latest announcement that they do not use META keywords to determine website rankings. This doesn’t come as a shock to most of us out there who have tried “keyword stuffing” in the past and had no results.
According to Google’s Webmaster Blog
Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking.
Google employee and general SEO spokesman Matt Cutts released the following video:
According to Matt Cutts, Google (and most other search engines) did use META Keywords several years ago as a factor in search engine rankings. However, SEO Spammers realized this and would spam the META keywords with unrelated keywords or even competitors keywords in order to manipulate their rankings. This has been done away with. Those of us out there looking to rank for specific keywords will have to use legitimate methods.
Does this mean that the META keyword tag is completely worthless? No. I actually happen to use it a little. Many ranking report programs will automatically pull META keywords from the website and use those to check for rankings. I will add my keywords for just this purpose, even though they have nothing to do with rankings themselves.
Image pulled from http://www.dynamixwebdesign.com
October 29th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
It does not come as a surprise at all. To me your keywords should be in your content and of course not spammed within it. Your content is what your site is about no matter what you stuff in your meta.