Google is telling the world what every seasoned webmaster and search marketer should already know: The keywords meta tag has no impact whatsoever on how Google’s search engine ranks pages. None. Zilch. Nada. And while Google often needs to be somewhat ambiguous when talking about how it ranks pages, the message in today’s blog post is perfectly clear:
“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.”
Google’s blog post also talks about an imagined clash between two web site owners, Bob and Alice, over Bob’s use of Alice’s business name in his keywords tag and copying of other words from her keywords tag. Although Google doesn’t mention actual companies and doesn’t reference a specific lawsuit, the video that accompanies the blog post does mention lawsuits that involve the keywords tag and Google’s search rankings. About the keywords meta tag, Matt Cutts says:
“It’s really not worth suing someone over because, at least for Google, we don’t use that information in our rankings even the least little bit.”
This is old news and most people know that just putting the keywords in the keyword meta tag has no effect at all, at least at Google. I guess this confirms it! Yet really the keyword meta tag hasnt been used for like 5 years or more and never really was that big of a factor anyway. The Title of each page though is very important, as is having solid unique content on all pages and many links from other websites pointing to your site using the keywords in the anchor text that you want to be ranked on.
VIDEO OF MATT CUTS TALKING ABOUT KEYWORD META TAG