By Elmer on September 22, 2009

I guess you have heard grumblings, advice and recommendations swirling around SEO circles that META keyword tag is a useless piece of code. Maybe you listened and dumped the idea of adding META keyword on every page of your website. Good for you.

Google reinforced the idea that keywords embedded on META keyword tag will not influence how search engines evaluate these pages. In the past, usage of keywords on META tags was a subject of a spate of lawsuits as trademark owners thought their brands were compromised when they were being used as META keyword element by some newcomer competitor. Worse, they thought if keywords are used on these someone’s META tags, there is a high likelihood that someone’s website will appear on top. I’ve experienced such era of confusion when a client who sold perfumes online warned me not to use Bvlgari, Anna Sui or other trademarked keywords for fear of getting sued and losing his business.

I hope this clears the air at least for Google, that putting keywords in the META tag will not impact search results whatsoever. It’s interesting that even before this official blog post was published, Google tried to disclose it to us: take a look at Google Webmaster tools’ explanation about Meta Tags and you won’t find any trace of META keywords.

When I revisited the website of that former client, and noted the presence of a large number of META keywords on each page. I guess I have an answer to the question why they are still aggressive in using the tag.

Bing, for example, has not recommended we abandon the idea:

“Fill in this tag’s text with relevant keywords and phrases that describe that page’s content.”

And Yahoo! was even more direct at highlighting the benefits of META keywords tag.

“Use a “keyword” meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page.”

Remember, META keywords is no longer meaningful to Google, but this doesn’t mean we will not pursue comprehensive keyword research anymore.

Photo credit: Jason Morrison

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