
Google doesn’t use the keywords meta tag in web search - nreece
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/keywords-meta-tag-in-web-search/
======
duskwuff
The amount of sheer silliness in the comments on the original blog post
astounds me.

"Let's call it Meta insurance. In case a service decides to use the keyword
tag someday, your site is prepared."

"I find it interesting that even though Google says they don't place any
weight for rank on them, that after a site of mine went through and added them
in, within weeks, they had a major jump in rank."

"Well, I say - (2D) Keywords were out a long time ago. The new 3DKeywords or
3D Keywords are coming soon. They are basically encoded keywords making them
more reliable and they can be controlled."

~~~
mahmud
_The amount of sheer silliness in the comments on the original blog post
astounds me._

The SEO industry is being silly all the way to the bank.

~~~
Semiapies
Damn right - SEO is just a modern incarnation of snake-oil salesmen, and
suckers are born every minute.

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tybris
Twilight zone. I stopped adding keywords tags to websites about a decade ago
when I learned search engines did not use them anymore.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I've understood that Yahoo/Ask still use keywords in that meta-tag (don't know
about Baidu &c.). Also I find it useful to list in the keywords field the
[genuine] keywords for a page/article. Local search can use this info, you
presumably know if you're spamming your own search results (!) and I can use
it if I'm trying to target advertising or am working on link building.

Lastly Google (Cutts) intimates the possibility it could be used in the
future. They did a turnaround on nofollow, so why not on this. They'd need to
have a very restrictive policy for sure. I could see them using something like
"words must appear from the top 10 words used by density in the article"* -
then they could spot check the keywords meet the standard and provide
something like increased crawl frequency on websites meeting the policy.
Continued failure could have your PR zeroed; then the keywords would simply be
a way for Google to reduce processing (* or whatever algo is useful, they
could even provide a tool to pre-process pages and give a keyword relevancy
rank).

------
pyre
I'm just waiting for the SEO 'witch doctors' to chime in about how Google is
lying and all of those 'Top 10 SEO Optmizations' blog posts are right.

I've always been suspicious as to the validity of any of the SEO material I've
ever come across. The only thing that people know for sure that helps search
rank are other sites linking to your site. (i.e. the only 'sure-fire' SEO
techniques are the Google Bomb and the Link Farm)

~~~
Tichy
I don't see keywords as a SEO thing. They seemed like a very plausible
invention, in the early days of the web. It is just that spam has apparently
destroyed them for the time being.

But I don't know why it should be assumed that they contain no useful
information? For example, it seems easy to check automatically if the keywords
actually match the site, thereby influencing the site's spam ranking (which
would be information). If Google does not use that information, perhaps other
services will.

~~~
pyre
In the early web you were encouraged to add these things, but nowadays I think
that the only reason that people end up still adding them is at the behest of
SEO 'experts.'

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brown9-2
A link to the official Google statement on this might be more appropriate:
[http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-
do...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-
keywords-meta-tag.html#main)

------
robin_reala
The problem has always been convincing clients that they’re unnecessary. Maybe
this will help, but SEO is such a cargo-cult culture that I rather doubt it…

~~~
Tichy
There might be other uses than impressing the Google bot. For example I have
seen bookmarking services that use them as default tags. And there are other
search engines besides Google.

~~~
robin_reala
_there are other search engines besides Google_

In the UK? Not really. Fair point on the bookmarking services though, not
heard that before.

~~~
Tichy
According to this article, Bing/Yahoo have 10 to 20% of the search market atm.
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/5504735/Micr...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/5504735/Microsoft-
Bing-grows-share-of-search-market.html)

In China, Baidu is more popular than Google.

~~~
robin_reala
Hmm, interesting. That jars with my personal experience: I know no-one,
whether technical or not using anything but Google (with the exception of my
grandparents who have some horrendous BT/Yahoo branded browser).

In China and other territories, then sure, Baidu, Yandex etc have much more
pull.

~~~
Tichy
Many people don't even know what a search engine is. They will just type the
search term into the location bar. Then the browser's default search engine
does the rest. For internet explorer, that would be Bing, I suppose. Since
apparently IE still has the majority of the browser market (another data point
that is hard to believe), that alone should account for a lot of usage.

------
Tichy
I believe that they stopped using them because of all the spam. The
interesting conclusion seems to be that tagging is useless in general
(keywords are just tagging of a web site, after all).

Still, spam evolves, maybe keywords evolve, too. I wouldn't be a 100% sure
that they won't make a comeback. I don't know if Google's ranking algorithm is
entirely tuned by hand - what if the machine decides that keywords are useful,
after all?

Also, they have other uses. For example some bookmarking services use them as
default tags if you bookmark a site. (Then again, apparently tags are
useless).

~~~
mmorris
I certainly see the resemblance, but I don't think that webpage keywords and
tagging systems are exactly the same.

One major difference is the identity of the tagger. The creator of the page is
generally the one adding the keywords, so there is an inherent bias that is
different from the perspective of users who add tags (though they're biased in
their own ways).

Ideally the perspective of the tagging users align with the perspective of
users who are using the tags to access content, and so the users following the
tags end up reaching content thats most appropriate.

~~~
Tichy
Good point about the identity of the tagger. Of course the SEOs can also
become taggers, but that is another problem.

