With all the major search engines long abandoning the META keywords tag (except for Yahoo, but its search results are soon to be powered by Bing), there seems to be less and less of a reason to use the META keywords tag.
Do you still use it? And by use it, I mean put effort into putting relevant keywords in the tag.
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Jack Leblond says:
Use – yes…a lot of effort – no. If they provide even a small clue to content *somehow*- great, if not – well, I’m only out a minute of my time.
steveplunkett says:
I actually started removing it to allow more characters of the body copy to be spidered.
it’s not a factor in search rankings.
Lyndsay Walker says:
That was my thought too Steve! So you could argue that it actually hinders ranking. Slightly. But by a lot more if you’ve shoved hundreds of keywords in there.
Lyndsay Walker says:
@Jack Leblond
That’s actually what drove me to ask the question. I don’t even want to spend a minute on it when I can use those 60 seconds for something more productive (which, in this case, appears to have been creating a poll).
John Thyfault says:
We used to use it as a documentation tool. It was never really effective for anything else.
We have backed out this year as part of our incremental page speed improvement effort for our clients. It is a small bit of bytes but every little byte counts. (feel free to groan over the alliteration)
Brian says:
Lyndsay, long time no see; maybe at pubcon again this year.
If a new client has been trying to stuff their meta with keywords, I just delete everything except the single keyword phrase I am trying to rank for. I use it just in case antiquated search engines still look at it. I haven’t noticed any negative affect in Google unless a client is keyword stuffing. If all you care about is Google and you are starting from scratch, I would skip it; keep that load time down to a minimum.
Alysson says:
Because some bookmarking services automatically populate titles, descriptions and keywords fields with the META information, I still use them. It takes only a few seconds to paste the target terms from a keyword map document into the META tag.
Scott Polk says:
Yes – I still use them, but automate the population – you never know what the engines may or may not revert back to. Not to mention it simply is a way to audit/task pages with keywords.
As far as saving space for more body copy to be spidered … highly doubtful that would be an issue in any major search engine. I have pages that have over 3500 words of indexed content on them … no issues there.
I do not believe you will be hurting yourself in the rankings by not using them, but I look items like this as “tie breakers” – all other things being even, this “may” help you – I say sweat the small stuff (but automate it)
Topher Kohan says:
Yes I use ut because a lot of on site search applications still use the meta keywords to return results.