keywords..

Well, I've always worked on the assumption that Google just ignored keywords (based on their own statements), but yesterday I spoke to someone who would have me believe that keywords are actually used when the keyword also occurs in the first 100 words of the page. This seems next to impossible to prove either way, but I'm wondering if anyone has any idea where he got this idea from and if anyone else here agrees?

 

i think you will find that google only ignores the keyword meta tag (this is based on info gained from various sites)

 

Google certainly does not ignore words and phrases on the page when returning pages for a search query.

I showed this in another thread here: Do a search for crap economical search engine optimization. What was the #1 entry two days ago (#3 today) is this page. The word "crap" appears once on that page, not in the title, description, or keywords meta tag. And (to my surprise ) I can't find any anchor text containing the word "crap" pointing to that page. I conclude that its high ranking for the search term crap economical search engine optimization is due to the inclusion of that combination of keywords in the on-page content.

 

Sorry, I don't think I made my question clear enough. I was referring to the keywords metatag.

I don't see why on-page content wouldn't be taken into account.

So, how confident are people that the keywords metatag is (still) ignored in Google?

 

Fairly certain at this point that it has little or no effect. That also seems to be true for the other major search engines although even a year or two ago some were still valuing it to some extent.

However, that said, one never knows what the future holds and there are some directories which still look for the keywords meta tag.

I do include one in my pages, though I don't expect it to count for much. It's only one line of html, after all.

 

Important distinction:

Google does factor the description Metatag (though not the keywords metatag).

Cheers,

JL

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Edit: I witnessed this (much to my surprise) when exploring the tactics used by various parties during the Seraphim Proudleduck comp last year.
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Could you really say for sure that meta keywords aren't taken into account when those keywords appear on the page also?

This was the claim that I was confronted with and am looking for opinions on.

Interesting that the meta description is taken into account. I always thought the only affect it had was as the page's snippet.

 

I think there are two issues here: Googlebot reads everything on the page and in the code. What Google does with all that information is another question, though. And if you type in a search query, Google will look for it in any pages within its index and any part of the page that it has indexed as well as anchor text in backlinks to that page -- and Google will highlight it in the SERPs.

So when you see something Google extracts from some part of the page, meta tags or page filename or on-page content, that tells you that Google knows it's there but not how much weight is given in the ranking to that particular occurrence of the search term.