Now that Yahoo has announced it will no longer support it, we can finally give the Meta Keyword tag a proper funeral. Yahoo announced this week that it hasn’t supported the use of the Meta keyword tag for some time, which follows on the heels of last month’s announcement from Google. Bing says they have never supported it. So that leaves none of the major search engines supporting the tag.
SEO’s have known for some time that Google has never really looked at the tag, but many Search Engine optimizers kept suggesting it because Yahoo did and it had a slight impact on results. For many clients, Yahoo traffic is substantial. The Meta keywords tag at best was a distraction to the core SEO techniques that are much more highly effective, namely title tags, site structure and keyword rich anchor links. At worst it was ‘magical’ solution for many non-SEO people who didn’t understand the multiple factors that go into attaining a top ranking.
In the early Pre-Google days the Meta keyword tag may have been somewhat effective in getting quick keyword rankings. You would simply put your keywords into the tag, upload to the site and resubmit your site to the 1000’s of search engines. Within a few days your site would rank for the terms in your tag. Like any other internet technique, the tag got abused. So instead putting in your keywords, SEO’s would put in high traffic keywords like “Britney Spears” and home to achieve a boatload of traffic to your site. I’m not sure if anyone actually got their site to rank highly for a term like that, but it helped contribute to giving the industry a bad name. The death of the Meta keywords tag is a blessing in that it will help focus on delivering real value to our clients.
So, the Meta Keyword tag, which has been pronounced dead many times over the years, can finally “rest in peace.”
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