Webstart Blog

There is an interesting post from John Mueller on the Google Webmaster Central Blog about meta tags and how Google interprets them. John lists the important tags that have some functionality when it comes to Google indexing the web page, he also lists some that have no effect. There was one tag that John had not included - the meta keyword tag.

Check Johns post and see the first comment asking him what Google do with the keyword tag - you will notice who the comment came from - I asked him:

“I notice that you do not mention the keywords meta tag - does this mean that Google totally ignores it?”

John’s reply confirmed my suspicions…

“Thanks for asking, Glen! You’re right in that we generally ignore the contents of the “keywords” meta tag. As with other possible meta tags, feel free to place it on your pages if you can use it for other purposes - it won’t count against you.”.

So there we have it straight from the horses mouth (no offence John) - Google IGNORE the keywords meta tag.

This comes as no surprise to a lot of people heavily into search engine optimisation but up until now it had not been confirmed and the meta tag was still being used as an active tag for improving search engine results.

Now all those keywords you thought were working in the meta tags need to be in the page content, not a problem for most websites, unless you were spamming keywords but of course no one did that - did they?