Google confirms irrelevance of the keywords meta tag

Google’s Webmaster Blog recently posted an article that confirmed the irrelevance of the keywords meta tag in the search engine’s ranking results. This created quite a ‘buzz’ on Twitter, blogs and discussion forums, although it’s been known for some years in the search engine optimisation business that Google ignores any content placed in this tag. However, there are still website owners or marketers who believe that the keywords tag is something to be concerned about.

When websites and search engines were being developed in the 1990′s, the keywords meta tag was a section of code that was used to determine the content and relevancy of a website within search results. However, as Google has stated in their recent blog post, the early trend of search engines to judge pages only on the web page content – including the meta tags – led to keyword ‘stuffing’ or spamming which couldn’t be seen by the regular user of a website and were techniques designed to manipulate the search engine results.

However, one of the main reasons for Google’s success was that they placed more emphasis on so-called ‘off-page’ factors, such as the links pointing to a web page, and they ignored content that was hidden to the website visitor, as this was seen to be irrelevant and open to manipulation. As a result, the keywords meta tag was ignored as a factor within the search engine’s ranking algorithm and so content placed here didn’t have any influence on how a website would be ranked for a search query.

Therefore, obsessing about this meta tag and which words to include in it is mostly a waste of time. It is recommended that the keywords tag is still used on each web page, but mostly as a default tag with some of the main terms that are relevant to the site content as a whole. Recent tests have shown that some search engines, such as Yahoo! and Ask, do still use the tag as an element of indexed website content, but it’s not likely to have a strong ranking factor. Google has also said that it’s possible they could use this information in the future, but this is also considered unlikely.

A more interesting aspect of the Google blog post is a brief comment about the description meta tag, which is often used to display the short snippet of information about a web page that appears below the link to the site in the search ranking results. This content is also usually hidden within the HTML code of a web page, but will be displayed in the search results if there isn’t relevant content that can be used from the visible page content. Google’s comment is that this tag is important and should be written in a way to accurately describe the content on the specific page, so as to encourage the clickthrough rate from the search results, but they say this content also has no impact of the search ranking results. This is more debatable however, and this tag does carry more importance as part of an SEO campaign, for both Google (with their guidelines on best usage here) and on other search engines.

If you’d like to know more about meta tags and the implications for your website’s optimisation strategy, please contact us now for a discussion.

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