Marketing Intelligence
The Meta Keywords Debate Is Over: Here’s Why
At the advent of the internet, the purpose of meta keywords was to label your webpage with its key points so when someone searched for a topic that you wrote about, they’d find your page.
The meta keyword used to be really important to this process but isn’t any longer. Instead, keyword research and content SEO are much more important tools to reach your audience.
Somehow, the topic seems to continually pop up in SEO circles: should we use meta keywords or not? The resounding response is no, get those out of here! There are better uses of your time that yield better return on investment (ROI).
What are meta keywords?
Meta means “beyond.” So, anything meta on your web page is beyond what displays on the page.
Visitors can’t see anything labeled “meta” in your code, with the exceptions of the meta title tag and meta description tag, which are usually displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs). But that doesn’t mean metadata isn’t important; there’s actually a ton of metadata in your code, which instructs the web browser how to display your data. Meta keywords are the fossils of SEO, in a way.
Where can you find your meta keywords?
If you’re confused about where to find meta tags, they show up on the backend of your webpage, a.k.a the source code that provides structure to your site. You’d have to be in your content management system or webpage dashboard as an admin to edit it.
Meta tags in your header
The meta keywords code is in the header section of your website. It will have this format: <meta name=”keywords” content=”Keyword1, Keyword2, Keyword3″> and will show up between these two elements: “<head> <head/>”
There will be other “tags” in this section that are labeled “meta.” These ones are important for digital marketing, so don’t delete them. The title tag and meta description tag show up as snippets on the search results page:
Are meta keywords the same as keywords?
Meta keywords are different from the keywords that you use in your page content for things like blogs, landing pages, etc.
- Keywords: Embed them as part of your content SEO to make them visible to your readers (and Google). Good keyword research is essential for identifying your target keywords.
- Meta keywords: Meta keywords were part of technical SEO. They alerted early search engines to what your page was about.
In a way, the meta keyword was the precursor to keywords. But, the usefulness of the meta keyword has long since expired, and in the world of SEO today, they are all but dead.
Does Google use meta keywords?
To understand why meta keywords are so unnecessary, you have to know how major search engines interact with your site.
What are search engines doing with your site?
You have a web page because you want to share something with the world. So, you want the right people to find it. Organic traffic is one pathway to your site. When someone finds you on a search engine, like Google, Bing, Ask, etc., this is organic traffic.
This is what Google does with your web page
Search engines organize the information on the internet so they can present it back to us. They use robots to “crawl” your web page, read content on the front and back end of your site, and then use this for different reasons including:
- Indexing: The search engine effectively makes a copy of your page and stores all of your HTML copy on servers. This gets updated from time to time to reflect the current state of the internet.
- Retrieval: When a visitor types something in the search bar, the search engine looks at the HTML copies it indexed. Then, It reads through them to match the search query, but it doesn’t look everywhere in the copy. It only pulls out the relevant bits.
- Ranking: Now, it takes everything it retrieved and ranks it in order of most relevant. There are over 200 factors in ranking, and each search engine has its own mix or algorithm.
Which search engines use meta keywords?
Early search engines used the meta keyword element for indexing, retrieval, and ranking. However, in the late 1990s, it became clear that the meta keywords function was easy to misuse.
One guess why?
If you guessed keyword stuffing, you got it. Irrelevant or misleading keywords were purposefully added into these tags, deeming them obsolete over time.
Search engines still index them but as a ranking factor, the meta keyword was dropped:
- 2002 – Google officially stated that it doesn’t use meta keywords in its retrieval or ranking.
- 2002 – Bing made an official statement that the meta keyword “flat lined years ago as a booster.”
- 2009 – Yahoo uses it to index and retrieve, but not to rank.
- 2012 – Baidu’s webmaster community says, “meta keywords have long been in the garbage heap of history, and we will ignore them directly.”
- 2020 – Yandex documents indicate meta keywords may still hold some value, but SEO experts in the country don’t really use them.
Why is this conversation still lingering?
The guidelines of Naver, Yandex, and Baidu suggest they may still use meta keywords. But in what capacity?
Remember, there are over 200 ranking factors.
Even if meta keywords are still used by some in ranking, they hold no power. The major search engines themselves have said they have low relevance. In other words, they matter as much as the color of an athlete’s uniform in awarding Olympic medals.
Should you use meta keywords: definitely no!
Now that you understand search engines, you can grasp why they ignore the meta keyword.
The thing is, if you’re browsing the web, we can’t blame you for getting a little confused. I mean, when I read the articles written about it, a lot of them tell you no, you shouldn’t and then seemingly also tell you yes. What is that?
That is the type of bad mixed messaging you shouldn’t tolerate anywhere (take notes for your dating life, if you need). You deserve a straight answer and that answer is no.
Here are some clues that this feature is definitively defunct:
1. Google never used meta keywords, to begin with.
Google came out in 1998, right after support for meta keywords fell out of favor. Google never supported the meta keyword as an indicator of retrieval or rank. It still indexes your meta keywords if you use them, but that’s where its involvement stops. Essentially, it just stores them and never looks at them again.
In mid-2024, Google had a leak of their search algorithm and ranking factors. Meta Keywords is not one of these ranking factors.
2. Yoast, the major SEO plugin for WordPress, wanted to remove them years before it finally did.
Yoast admitted it kept a meta keyword function on its site just to keep consumers happy. This lasted for years. It removed it completely in 2018.
P.S
Some people confused Yoast’s focus keyword with meta keyword. They are not the same thing.
3. Bing indicated meta keywords are more useful to mark spam, which is a negative rank signal.
The search engines killed the meta keyword because of manipulative misuse. Now, it may still be used as an indicator – but an indicator that your site is spammy.
4. Meta keywords can be useful for your competitors to steal your hard work.
Your competitors can see or scrape your meta keywords. Then, they use this to compete directly against your SEO strategy.
5. Decision-makers at Bing and Google restated this message in their personal time.
And their tone is so exasperated, it gave me a good laugh. If nothing else convinces you, this should:
Bing’s Former Head of Evangelism Christi Olson is so definitive, it’s almost comical. She doesn’t just say it, she screams it for the people in the back:
“The meta keyword tag is dead in terms of SEO value for @BingWMC. We exclude it and ignore it.”
Matt Cutts of Google left this message on his own web page as if to say: ‘Yeah guys, don’t know why you can’t let this go. Now I have to talk about it in my downtime!’
How to remove meta keywords
Since the meta keywords feature is defunct, you should consider removing it.
The meta keywords may all be pulling from the same spot and be easily fixable with one line of code. If you notice this is the case with your site, here’s how to fix it.
The code may actually be bloating your website, which could slow your load times and negatively impact your rank.
Conclusion – Meta keywords are not a priority for SEO
Read the receipts. Meta keywords are no longer a priority in your SEO strategy.
- It’s been over 20 years since the search engine with the majority of market share officially declared meta keywords dead.
- The risk that they’re slowing your site and acting as a spam signal is actually more of a concern.
- Your time would be better spent on quality content, embedded keywords, and other meta tags.
To drive the point home: of the seventeen articles linked in this site, none of them included meta keywords in their code.
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