Google Addresses Their Stance on Keywords
In case you haven’t heard already, the Gospel According to Matt Cutts has spoken, and the truth is out: Keyword meta tags don’t matter – at least to Google. Long thought to be a playground for spammers to stuff irrelevant or unnecessary terms into a web page’s backend to make it rank higher in organic searches, Google announced last Monday (and Cutts followed up on his own blog) that the web’s leading search engine actually pays no mind to that part of the game.
You can find Google’s whole rundown here, but the essence of their organic search is pretty much summed up by this little Cutts snippet:
Google uses over two hundred signals in our web search rankings, but the keywords meta tag is not currently one of them, and I don’t believe it will be.
Now, this certainly doesn’t mean that you should forgo this step in your SEO efforts. Bing has made it known recently that they still place a heavy emphasis on meta tag keywords, and it’s long been known that Yahoo! values the process, as well.
The search engine game is a mad dash to figuring out how to make organic searches as humanistic as possible. Google’s recent announcement is nothing new, but it does demand that we ask the question: Are Cutts and company playing chess while everyone else is stuck on checkers?
Thats quite interesting, especially the bit about using the meta description if it’s good, how do they detect if it’s good???
I’m not so sure that this is true. I think that if you put a nonsense word into a meta keyword tag and nowhere else, the page will eventually show up in Google when you do a search for that word. Just about to try it and see.
That it is quite bizarre, I would have thought they would some weight towards keywords as this should indicate what the site us about. Yes it can be open to abuse but it also penalises the people who use them correctly.
Interested to see what you find, Phil. Have you tried the test yet?
I’ve got a small company selling studio backdrops and photographic backgrounds. I’ve been playing about with optimisation for a while and
found changing meta tags didn’t make any difference at all. Changing the meta description did!
Meta tags make a difference in Yahoo.
i recently changed my site titles and got a boost in organic rankings
I have never payed much attention to the meta keyword tags for my websites anyways. I think title and url are very important as far as google is concerned.
Thanks for your post, a good domain with keyword will give a a good rank in google.