Meta Keywords Good or Bad

[airnwater]

Hi All,

I've been reading more about the meta keyword tag and why it may not be a good idea to include them on pages and am looking for thoughts/feedback on this idea. If you have employed this tactic, can you give me some insight into any results you saw.  If you decided to not employ this tactic, why did you choose not to? I wan to understand all sides of this before employing any changes to my company's websites.

Thank you for your help!

[BabyBeauBelle]

They are not used by search engines anymore and is really just a good way for your competitors to see what keywords you might be targeting. I would not use them.

[FedeEinhorn]

Well, I've removed the keyword tag from all my Websites about 2 years ago. Mainly because Google said they don't use it anymore. However, Bing said that they could still use the meta to figure out what is the page about. Still we haven't see change in terms of rankings.

I personally won't use that meta again, just to remove some clutter from the page. With all today's metas (authorship, OGs, twitter cards, etc.) you are just adding more "garbage" that actually doesn't do anything.

[AWCthreads]

I wouldn't spend my time deleting them as its a waste of time since Google ignores them.

If I'm working on SEO or other page elements and want to do some housecleaning I get rid of them.

On all current SEO practices, meta keywords are completely off the to-do list.

[MoosaHemani]

There are 100s of areas that search engines look in to before ranking any website against any key phrase.  Meta keyword tag is one of the areas which are considered as less important.

Google have clearly recommended not to use it and they do not use this as a ranking factor but as far as the Bing is concern they do use it as a ranking signal but still this does not land in important ranking factors.

There are no significant reasons why I do not use it because there are tools which can indicate competitors that what keywords i am focusing, so saying that I am not using so that my competitors didn’t get to know what I am up to is silly!

I think Meta keyword tag is like good for nothing... Use it or don’t use it... it does not matter much i think you should invest your time looking in to other important areas and i believe that will be the better use of the time!

[DougRoberts]

The only time I've ever used keywords recently was when a competitor kindly laid out all of the keywords they're targeting in their meta keywords tag!

As the others have said, meta keywords just isn't worth the worry, it's not going to affect how search engines interpret your page* and you're better off spending the time on setting up authorship, open-graph etc.

(*Bing have even said that in some cases they may use the keywords meta tag as an indicator of a spammy site.)

[Silkstream]

We havent used Meta keywords for a couple of years but I read an interesting article yesterday that suggested using this field to list semantic keywords and synonyms that you couldnt fit naturally into the body content. Havent tried it yet, just thought it was an interesting concept.

[trevogre]

What about using it just a a simple place to keep your targeted keyword for a given page while you are working? So if you have a number of hand coded page and want to quickly go through and put in what you are going for there before you start changing the page to suit. I'm not sure why you would care if competitors knew? If your page is optimized your keyword phrase for that page is in the title and the h1 so they can crawl your site if they want and get all of them anyway.