The Branson Pro

The keywords tag is dead.

There has been a lot of controversy over the Meta “keywords” tag throughout the SEO community. Many webmasters obsess over it. Others believe that search engine optimization revolves solely around it…

But the truth (and fact) of the matter is that the keywords tag is dead and virtually useless.

To back this statement up and prove why it is dead, I’ll be referencing a case study that was conducted by SEO guru Paul. He is a world-renowned SEO professional in the UK. His site is located at: Making Money On Sitepoint.

A little history: a few years ago, Google and the other major search engines put a lot of weight into a web page’s keywords tag. The keywords that were listed inside of this meta tag told the search engines exactly what the page was about (and therefore helped to add relevancy to the page, boosting it’s spot in the SERPs).

But it didn’t take long before people started abusing the keywords tag in order to manipulate the search engines.  The practice of “keyword stuffing” became common. And webmasters began to repeat the same keywords, over and over. Or they would even jam 1000+ keywords inside of the tag, in an effort to fool the search engines.

Google quickly caught on to this and began to devalue the tag as a whole. It didn’t take them long to finally quit “paying attention” to it. And it’s probably not part of the ranking algorithm anymore (nobody can say that for sure but based on the following research, it’s clear that they don’t use it in their algo).

Take a look at this page: http://www.word07.com. Once you view the source code for it, you can see that the meta keywords tag reads: <meta name=“keywords” content=“Microsoft Word 2007, free tutorials” />
And since the web page is all about free Microsoft Word 2007 tutorials, the keywords tag is clearly relevant to the site’s content. Right?

But if you do a Google search for the content included inside of the keywords tag, the site does not come up anywhere: Click Here To See. The same results are shown in Yahoo and MSN (Bing).

If the keywords tag could alter the SERPs and actually help a website rank higher, then why wouldn’t Paul’s Word07 site show up in the above search? It’s obvious that Google isn’t including it as a determining factor for ranking.

I’ve even went as far as completely removing the keywords tag from some websites before, just to see what would happen. And even after a couple of months, they still held their rankings for the same keywords that were being targeted.

If anything, the keywords tag could potentially hurt you. I say that because all a competitor has to do is view the source of your page and then they can see the keywords you are targeting and try to go after them to beat you.

But Paul says:

“What I normally do is include a keywords meta tag just for completeness but have the expectation that it has no effect…”

So you might decide to keep it in place, just to stay on the safe side of things. The day may come when the search engines start to value it again.

Still to this day, it cracks me up when I’m doing SEO analysis on a website and see that they have 50 keywords placed inside the tag. But it only goes to show how little the webmaster knows about what is really important (relevancy and links).

Honestly, if you hire a company to do your SEO and they have stuffed your keywords tag, you might want to consider firing them on the spot A stuffed keywords tag is a clear indicator of an uneducated person….

If someone truly knows SEO, they know that the keywords tag is NOT an element of the SEO process.

Thanks again to Paul for all of his efforts and researching!