Yahoo confirms: The meta keywords tag is dead

[djbaxter]

Yahoo Drops The Meta Keywords Tag Also
Search Engine Roundtable
October 8, 2009

It is official, no major search engines use the meta keywords tag for ranking purposes in their search algorithms. Yahoo's, matter of fact, announcement of this on Tuesday during the Ask The Search Engines: Best Practices Edition at SMX East conference was a bit of a shock.

For a long time, the industry some what made fun of Yahoo for using it (at all) for ranking purposes. Then, during the Q&A period of the session, Cris Pierry, Senior Director, Search, Yahoo said at 2:09pm (EST), that they no longer use the meta keywords tag for rankings. In fact, Yahoo stopped using it a "few months ago," said Pierry.

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[kbldshmn]

I hope it doesn't hurt to use the meta keyword tag because it's a field in Wordpress article panel and it often helps me figure out and fine tune what my post is about.

 

[djbaxter]

No, I don't know of any evidence that it hurts, at least if it isn't "keyword stuffed". It's just ignored.

 

[djbaxter]

Actually, there is one way that it could hurt: You are revealing your important keywords to your competitors.

Also:

Oops. Or is it (dead)?

Sorry, Yahoo, You DO Index The Meta Keywords Tag

 

[gamesrebel]

So now we are safe to remove the meta keyword tags from our pages right? As I think by now no search engine will focus on such a tag.

 

[djbaxter]

You were safe to remove them about 5 years ago or more.

 

[bigcat1967]

I'm ashamed to say this - but I never focused on Yahoo - only on Google. I knew Google could care less about the meta KW tag - but I didn't know what Yahoo's stance was on this. Now I know.

 

[djbaxter]

No need to be ashamed, really... Yahoo has fallen on hard times. They became a small player a long time ago and now with Bing they are on their way to becoming even smaller.

The reality is that if you optimize for Google, you're pretty much going to do just fine on the other search engines too. And whether we like it or not, Google is still the biggest gun in town.