Lately I have noticed that lotta people (uneducated self proclaimed SEO) are moving towards this technique of stuffing keywords in different meta tags. Due to which, I have seen plenty of crazy meta tags name come up. Although Google says that the meta tags are not very important but test have shown that such activities do get you the results. I also think such activities crosses the thin line between grey to black. Your thoughts? Luckily stumbled upon a link today searching for word "homeopathy" http://www.drbatras.com/ (check source)
Yeah, absolutely right! We can use any meta keywords in our page whether is related with the site or not. So, here search engines are getting beat. I think, actually Meta Keywords are required for flash sites where no live texts. Who know how google is using meta keywords. May be they are using meta keywords for only flash sites and ignoring other sites like us.
I wouldn't consider this grey or black, but stupid. Stuffing meta tags is like holding up a red flag to Google and saying, check my site out, i'm spamming. It's not subtle, it's not hidden, every man and his dog can see what you're doing. What do you think then happens? They'll be in the sandbox or banned quicker than you can say Google spam. Also, tests i've read have shown that if you have too many keywords in your meta keywords, you'll drop like a stone before long. They want 5-10 per page that are relevant.
the point here is not <meta name="keyword"> stuffing but meta tags stuffing like example: <meta name="morning"> <meta name="afternoon"> <meta name="evening"> <meta name="night"> I can send you a dozen links where I have seen them into effect, so to say meta tags are irrelevant will be short-sightedness.
Because indexing data from Meta body can be do more quickly than indexing all your page and collecting only contents from huge source code. And SE programmer also know that human write is better than there contents collector machine / crawler.
They certainly do not help very much. I have seen them too on competitor's sites, but on the long (not too long) run I've outranged them all with some proper onpage optimization.