It’s official, Google ignores keyword meta tags
Published by on September 23rd, 2009 3 Comments »
The debate has swung this way and that for some time now about the SEO effectiveness, or not, of keyword META tags. This week, Google finally put the record straight.
In a recent video and transcribed blog post – Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking – Matt Cutts of Google’s Search Quality Team spoke clearly as to whether keywords meta tags offered any influence in a web page’s search visibility:
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.
So there it is, no more wondering, no more endless speculation and scrabbling for evidence of whatever side of the fence one might sit.
Could this be a hint of more, clear-cut statements like this from Google?
I doubt it. The air of mystery works very much to their advantage and keeps the SEO world running rings around itself drying to second guess Google’s technology.
What it does signify is a move away from deliberately inserted page elements to a more whole-page approach, taking the real, visible content to determine page context and authority – in addition to many other factors.
3 Responses to “It’s official, Google ignores keyword meta tags”
Leave a Reply
COMMENT APPROVAL POLICY: Please use a genuine name and email address for your comment. Please use your real name, not SEO keyword text. Please limit any outgoing links in your comment to a maximum of ONE, which should not be the same as you entered URL in the form. Please be considerate to other commenters. Please be relevant to the blog post and contribute to the discussion. Blatant link generation comments (we get a lot of those!) will be deleted. LICENSE By submitting a comment here you grant this site a perpetual license to reproduce your words and name/web site in attribution. Your comment may be edited or removed by a site admin if deemed necessary.
Yes.. Google ignores them.. It considers these elements to be irrelevant ones.. Google is very brilliant..! Angeline @ Marcus evans scam
I discovered that things a few month ago…when i changed bad tags in my clients site, nothing changed, so it don’t work yet….
I heard that this was the case a while back and have been collecting a selection of sources (this included) to present to our seo agency who still insist on using them and billing us for the time they take to implement them.
Thanks for explicitly stating this