Google Ignores the Keyword Meta Tag for Ranking

There is no doubt that having good SEO can have a huge beneficial effect on your online business but the practice is more of an esoteric ritual than it is science. Search engines keep most of their internal recipes close to heart and for good reason but this can lead to a lot of misconceptions that become heavily rooted if not corrected. For once, Google has decided to shed some light on the way it uses, or rather doesn't use, keywords meta data. It turns out that Google has been ignoring the keywords meta tag completely for several years after it became abused by many website owners.

“Suppose you have two website owners, Alice and Bob. Alice runs a company called AliceCo and Bob runs BobCo. One day while looking at Bob's site, Alice notices that Bob has copied some of the words that she uses in her "keywords" meta tag. Even more interesting, Bob has added the words "AliceCo" to his "keywords" meta tag. Should Alice be concerned?,” Matt Cutts, head of Google's Search Quality team, wrote. “At least for Google's web search results currently, the answer is no. Google doesn't use the "keywords" meta tag in our web search ranking.”

The reason why Google decided to come out and make it clearer that it doesn't consider the keywords meta data in its search results rankings, despite the fact that it wasn't exactly a closely guarded secret, is evident from the example Cutts uses. Apparently, more and more companies were concerned about competing companies using their trademarks in the keywords list and many were turning to legal means of handling the problem. Google intends to deter some of them from filing unnecessary lawsuits.

So what exactly does it mean for website owners? Well, for now, Google doesn't use the keyword meta tag in its rankings in any way and hasn't done so for quite a few years but it may decide to start using it again at some point in the future, thought it is unlikely. However, the search engine does support a number of other meta tags and uses them in other ways but not necessarily for the rankings.