Google Ignores Keyword Meta Tag

It’s been a big misconception for a long period of time that keyword tags were still regarded as something of importance. We all know for good usability purposes that adding a keywords meta tag is still a good idea, but for what reasons?

Surely, the fact that Google does not class the keyword tag as important is still not a good enough reason to leave the tag out?

Well, we already know that Google will evaluate a websites relevancy based on its content, internal structure and its backlink profile. Why would keyword meta tags pose as any benefit when all they do is allow a webmaster to specify what the main keywords are for the page.

The problem with this is that it is a webmaster controlled element, which it can be used improperly, which has been a massive problem in the past. Search engines would get nowhere by using keywords in the meta tag, purely because of the fact that most tags are not given the correct data.

It is true, keyword meta tags are really depreciated, but may still be of use when submitting your website or pages from your website to directories or webmaster controlled resource websites. If however, your website is built on a dynamic platform, then its probably best not to worry since search engines will only extract visible content for relevancy checking.

So, yes it is true, Google no longer bothers with the keyword meta attribute. This was a very speculative area until Matt Cutts announced in one of his latest posts, we have added in his video so you can watch it.

It is most likely that the tags have been ignored for a long period of time, especially since Google’s algorithm has become incredibly advanced, and would place no emphasis on a tag that is nearly always used incorrectly.

Google’d queries will return results based on quality and not how many times a keyword has appeared in the document. Because of this critial factor keyword tags really are something that is overlooked.

But don’t drop all your meta eggs out of the meta basket. The description tag is still used, especially on websites that lack content, or do not provide enough descriptive data within the body content. Adding in a meta description is still evaluated because of its visibility within search results.

So next time you go to add that keywords tag, remember, its not Google’d and it won’t get you a number 1 ranking!.

Google themselves released a statement surrounding keyword tag usage. Because it was a HTML standard, nearly all created HTML documents carried it. During the late 1990’s webmasters began to abuse it by stuffing in as many keywords as possible, often exceeding 1000 characters (300 keywords) crammed into a tag that was meant to house 4-5 keywords relating to the page content.

Because this tag was abused so heavily, Google begun to disregard its important, although most of the public were oblivious to this, keyword tags continued to suffer spam, to the point where Google dis-regarded their value, instead, Google’s focus remained on content and the sites backlink profile. These factors, in today’s online search market, are still important.

Keywords would be enhanced in any HTML document, providing they appeared enough in the content and within the tag itself, but it was this rule that led to the huge overflow that was keyword spamming. Webmasters continued to abuse documents with excessive keyword integration, not just in the keyword meta tag, but in the content itself, often using doorway pages to capture as many people as possible.

Doorway pages were the most common places to find abused keyword meta attributes, sometimes, pages would take more then 10 seconds to render, simply because the code took so long to download.

SO, next time you create a HTML document, remember, the keyword tag won’t score you any brownie points with Google.

In today’s online search market it really has become a dog eat dog world with millions upon millions of websites all competing for that place in the search engine limelight. With a billion strong index, search engines have to choose very carefully which websites will get a page 1 listing for relative keywords, and which websites don’t cut the mustard. read more

Adobe has been a big part of the computing world since the early days of image editing, document processing and dynamic video/flash content. Adobe has expanded very quickly, especially since it acquired Macromedia’s suite of design and development tools, which saw the transition from macromedia flash/dreamweaver into Adobe Dreamweaver CS series. read more