I’m no expert, but last I heard…meta tags had very little influence
Quality information, quality links into your content, etc are most important
Meta tags are nowadays not as important as they used to be.It only helps the search engines to get information about your site. So concentrate more on other off page activities.
the keyword tag is surely not important, but the title and the description tags are very important, they have a huge effect on the rankings.
I don’t think off site optimizations should be compared with on site, because it does not really take much of a hard work to put good, targeted title and description tags… and when you can put time and money into doing all that, press release/article submission etc. you can surely put in a few minutes to make your pages seo friendly 🙂
Q: Does Google ever use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking?
A: In a word, no. Google does sell a Google Search Appliance, and that product has the ability to match meta tags, which could include the keywords meta tag. But that’s an enterprise search appliance that is completely separate from our main web search. Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.
Q: Why doesn’t Google use the keywords meta tag?
A: About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.
Q: Does this mean that Google ignores all meta tags?
A: No, Google does support several other meta tags. This meta tags page documents more info on several meta tags that we do use. For example, we do sometimes use the “description” meta tag as the text for our search results snippets. Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.
Q: Does this mean that Google will always ignore the keywords meta tag?
A: It’s possible that Google could use this information in the future, but it’s unlikely. Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years and currently we see no need to change that policy.
That’s outta the mouth of google. Of course Google is only one search engine. But people seem to always be worried about their google rank specifically
@rev. Voodoo, yes i have read some of those replies in the matt cutts blog and other google webmaster forums, and based on that i posted my reply above… thanks for posting the answers, though if you have linked them with the source, it would have been more trustworthy 🙂
keyword meta tag is dead for ages now, i don’t really see the other search engines use it, though the description meta tag is used a lot by bing and yahoo as it helps me rank on those (talking from personal experience). I have seen google use the description tag to take snippents in search ranking pages but i did not knew that it did not affected rankings?
I’m sorry for not posting the link, you are correct, that would have been better…. it’s off of the google webmasters official blog….. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
I didn’t want to imply nobody uses the description, just that google doesn’t. Most people seem to be most concerned with google around here when asking SEO questions.
Rev. Voodoo, thanks much for that link. It comes at a handy time, when SEO is very much on my mind!
