Official: Google doesn’t use the keywords Meta Tag in Web Search & SEO

: Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr

Matt Cutts (head engineer at Google) highlights this post on the Google webmaster blog to make it super official, but echoes the point here as well: Google does not use the keywords meta tag in our web search.

We wanted to debunk that misconception, at least as it regards to Google.

Google doesn’t use Meta Tag

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.

In addition to the official blog post, Google posted a video: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Matt hopes this clarifies that the keywords meta tag is not something that you need to worry about, or at least not in Google.

Some of the feedback from SEO and Web Developers showed that they were less than impressed.

Patrick asks, “when you say “BASICALLY none” or “REALLY not at all” are you trying to confuse us?? Can you just say “none” and “not at all” in an affirmative voice?”

Jeremy Rivera tries to clarify what Matt is saying “is that as far as regular, organic results they make no difference. However with custom or refined searches they might. Also, this doesn’t mean that other search engines like Yahoo and Bing don’t use them…”

So, is there any harm in using the keyword meta tag?

The Google Webmaster post included:

“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.”

Jason Sarracini adds that he finds that information a lot more newsworthy then the fact that Google ignores the keyword meta tag.

Others asked if keyword meta tags used at all in image search, or for example to help Google’s contextual ads determine the page’s context?

UPDATE:

Matt has cleared up a few points:

Nothing in how we score keyword meta tags has changed in the last few years, so nothing has changed about the ways to rank well on Google.
We use the keywords meta tag not at all in our web search ranking. Full stop.
Our web search doesn’t use the keywords meta tag at all.

To make it super clear

Matt: There’s no harm to using the keywords meta tag other than wasting your time.

“ I just wanted to clarify Google’s position (that we don’t use the keywords meta tag). Maybe this will help some people avoid getting stressed about things that don’t affect search engines, or at least that’s my hope.”

Read the full article on Matt Cutts: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/keywords-meta-tag-in-web-search/