It’s something that has been known or at least suspected for a while now but to clarify things, Matt Cutts has confirmed on the Google Webmaster Central Blog that Google “disregards keyword metatags completely.” He adds “They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.”
Matt explains the reason for Google not using the keywords meta tag -
“About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.”
Of course this doesn’t mean Google ignores all meta tags. They do make use of other tags including the description meta tag and the title tag (not technically a meta tag but usually grouped with the description and keyword tags). You can read more about the supported meta tags on this Google Webmaster Tools help page.
Matt says they “…do sometimes use the description meta tag as the text for our search results snippets…” Where this information isn’t available, publicly available information from DMOZ may be used instead. The Google Webmaster Tools help page says that “While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won’t impact your ranking within search results.”
If this is the case why should you even bother with the description meta tag?
Two reasons:
- As the content of your description tag is usually what is displayed in search results a well crafted description can entice searchers to enter your site over one of the others on the same search results page. This doesn’t mean you should lie however which leads to reason number two.
- If you use a truthful and accurate description of what your web page is about you can improve the quality of your traffic and reduce the bounce rate of your visitors as they will be more likely to be interested in your content if it was accurately described in the search results from where they came.
Going back to the keywords meta tag Matt finished by saying “It’s possible that Google could use this information in the future, but it’s unlikely. Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years and currently we see no need to change that policy.”
