What is a Meta Keyword? Is it helpful? Why should I need to use it? These are all types of questions people frequently ask after reading some much information on the internet. Most new SEO people don't know whether or not they might be sure that they should have to use Meta Keywords or not!!!
This quick article will break down all quarries related to the meta keyword element. Also shows you recently what experts have said about it and does search engines still consider this factor or not!!!!
What are Meta Keywords?
Meta Keywords is the type of <meta> tag which is used in the HTML source code of a webpage. This <meta> can be found in the <header> portion of your website and you can see it from the view page source code. This tag indicates to the search engine that what kind of information is available on your webpage.
At the beginning of the SEO, search engines did not have any certain algorithm. So at that time, the meta keyword element played a vital role in the search process. When search engine crawlers scan your webpage and with help of the meta keyword element determines what a page is about.
History of Meta Keywords:
Before Google, the other search engines were worked and they included the step of the meta keyword element in HTML to provide proper information to a user while a search on the relevant query.
Those keywords are relevant to your webpage content. This meta keyword element has contained a list of keywords and that can be separated by commas.
The placement of the meta keyword element was founded in the <header> section of your webpage and its structure looked like: <meta name="keywords" content="Keyword1, Keyword2, Keyword3">
Death of Meta Tag:
For a long time, this meta keyword element was considered a real "Low Hanging Fruit" in the search engine game. But in 2002 by following the Danny Sullivan article on Search Engine Watch: Death of Meta Tags has proven that the meta keyword would not go longer in the search engine process. Where Danny told that the "Inktomi" was the only search engine that supported meta keywords at that time.
"The ascendancy of the tag did not last after 1997. Experience with the tag has showed it to be a spam magnet. Some web site owners would insert misleading words about their pages or use excessive repetition of words in hopes of tricking the crawlers about relevancy. For this reason, Excite (which also owned WebCrawler) resisted added support. Lycos quietly dropped its support of the tag in 1998, and newer search engines such as Google and FAST never added support at all." - source(Search Engine Watch)
AltaVista (a.k.a.Yahoo) has found that "keywords repetition and spam made it an unreliable indication of site content and quality", so they had dropped support for the meta keyword tag in 2001.
However, it’s not complete death of meta keywords until in 2009 Google publicly affirms that "the meta keyword is longer relevant for the ranking factor.
Google and Bing
Google consistently affirms that it does not use meta keyword elements during your SEO process it would help your website in the site ranking.
Yandex and Baidu
If you check the Yandex support page: "Meta tags that Yandex takes into account" which indicates that the meta keyword element, ‘’Can be used when determining the page's relevance to search queries".
If you notice then this support page has a 2020 copyright tag, so most probably at present-day Yandex search engine support the meta keyword element in the ranking factor.
By 4 July 2018, the following article "Why You shouldn’t Use Meta Keywords Tag for Baidu SEO Anymore" authenticates that Baidu no longer supports the meta keyword element in the site search process.
In a Nutshell:
Some of the search engines program and algorithm may support the meta keyword elements to provide a power search. But Google algorithms and programmable search do not consider the meta keyword element in the SEO process or ranking factor.
So always check the search engine support page and if it supports meta keyword elements, then you can use it on your website. But if the search engine doesn’t rely on the meta keyword element, kindly don’t use it. Because it counts as spamming and maybe search engines can penalize your website.
