This is a big question I had for several months. Earlier, I used to pay good attention to adding meta keywords. But after installing the Yoast SEO plugin, it said that meta keywords are useless. It disabled them. But I enabled again. So, my question is, are they really useless? Now that Google is taking down high SEO sites, will meta keywords play a role in that also?
Google doesn't use the keyword meta tag to rank websites any more, cos the keyword was always used irrelevantly to the content of websites. After that google doesn't give much intention to the keyword meta tag. Then every meta tag is useless at all?? No, google still using many meta tags such as; title is used to be the title of the search result, and description is used to be the description snippet of the search result. But for keyword tag, google has ignored it for years.
Now a day Google doesn't use keywords for SERP purposes, but not sure about other search engines. anyone know about Bing and yahoo?
I personally feel that keywords helps to bring sites in search result easily. So I don't find it useless.
they are still important even if Google says they are not using them. i can see that 99.9% of all the websites in the world have meta keywords and some search engines are still crawling them.
There is no reason why Google would be completely inconsiderate of Meta keywords. They assist in telling Google what your target it, like h1,h2,h3 tags. Htags are meta tags in themselves. I would make use of Meta Keywords because it's the right thing to do. Meta Meta Meta. There is also Bing to contend with. What do you guys think?
I found this link it may be helpful, googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
As Google's Matt Cutts says: the answer is that they do not use this information at all. It appears that Bing are still using it in a way (http://searchengineland.com/the-met...at-bing-why-only-spammers-should-use-it-96874), so just remember to avoid stuffing the meta keyword tag.