Google Admits Keywords don't Count
Once upon a time, one could often attain high search engine rankings simply by filling the meta “keywords” tag of their website with targeted (or untargeted) terms, the later being a black hat method.
Of course, search engines became aware of the fact web developers and spammers were trying to cheat the system and largely started to ignore or at least de-emphasize the importance of the keywords tag in their algorithms.
Now, Google has stated that currently the tag has no influence, at least in their search results, though they haven’t ruled out using it in the future.
According to a post on their webmaster blog today:
When asked how Google uses the keyword meta tag, Matt Cutts (Google Software Engineer) answered;
“At least for Google’s web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is not at all. Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking.”
So does this mean we should ditch the meta Keyword? well in a word, No. The reason being,other search engines use the keyword tag and Google hasn’t ruled out the possibility of using it in future, so as one comment on the post wrote “Let’s call it Meta insurance. In case a service decides to use the keyword tag someday, your site is prepared.”