To better understand, let’s talk about the history of meta keyword tags and why they were created. Before Google, search engines were very basic. They crawled the web and created a searchable database, similar to today’s search engines, but, were not very intelligent. We had Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, WebCrawler, Infoseek and other early, mostly defunct search engines. These engines crawled the web and used the meta tags including the keyword meta tag to know what topics a website was about.

This meta keywords element is invisible to visitors but was visible to search engines. The keywords you put into this element’s content attribute would then be used as a ranking factor by the search engines. Used… over 20 years ago!

If this sounds like you’re asking AltaVista and Yahoo directly to just rank you for whatever keyword you want. People started spamming this keywords element and search engines began ignoring it. In September 2009, Google announced officially what was true for years back then: “Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking”. 

The Bing Webmasters even implied that using the keyword tag the wrong way could work against you, because it’s rather seen as a spam signal than a ranking signal.

Now remember: it’s just the keyword metatags that has been obsolete. Don’t believe all those SEO Guru’s who say all metatags are dead. 

Continue reading about the import metatags.