Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Google does not use Meta keywords to rank a website

Posted: 02 Nov 2009 11:13 PM PST

I know this is old news but I was speaking to a client of mine a couple of days ago and another web-design company contacted him a week ago suggesting that with the correct Meta data (keywords) in his website pages, they can get him to rank on the first page of the “Google” search engine results for his given keywords and keyword phrases.

Well just to be funny, I’ve sent the “web-design” company a link to the YouTube video where Matt Cutts explains this. Find the video below.

These are the questions that was stated to him. You can find the full list here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

Q: Does Google ever use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking?

A: In a word, no. Google does sell a Google Search Appliance, and that product has the ability to match meta tags, which could include the keywords meta tag. But that’s an enterprise search appliance that is completely separate from our main web search. 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.

Q: Why doesn’t Google use the keywords meta tag?

A: About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.

Q: Does this mean that Google ignores all meta tags?

A: No, Google does support several other meta tags. This meta tags page documents more info on several meta tags that we do use. For example, we do sometimes use the “description” meta tag as the text for our search results snippets.

Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.

Q: Does this mean that Google will always ignore the keywords meta tag?

A: It’s possible that Google could use this information in the future, but it’s unlikely. Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years and currently we see no need to change that policy.

Well there you have it. Meta data (keywords) are not used to rank your website. Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding this.

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