Google Ignores "Keyword" Meta Tag

23 September 2009

According to Matt Cutts, Google doesn't use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking. This should come as no surprise, really, but unfortunately there are still a lot of people that waste a lot of time on this.

While Google may ignore the "keywords" meta tag, that doesn't necessarily mean it is ignoring all meta tags. For example, Google often  uses the "description" meta tag as the descriptive text for search results snippets. Even so, the "description" meta tag isn't utilized by Google to influence web site ranking.

"Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag." ~Matt Cutts

Love 'em or hate 'em, Google does control the vast majority of what people do and don't find on the internet when they perform a search from a market share perspective. It's theoretically possible that this could change in the future, but currently, it looks like webmaster are going to have to heed Google for a long time.