Meta description & Meta keywords

[iivgi]

Good morning,

One of our HTML experts, just told me that Google is not reading meta keywords or meta description - and they (or one of them) are no longer part of my website SEO ranking

Do you know where can i read about it?

Are other SE do look at these parameters?

Thank you

SEOWiseUs

[smarties954]

meta keywords are no longer read by google. It's been abused in the past and it's not relevant anymore.

Drop the meta keywords as it gives valuable information to your competition on which keywords you target .

the meta description is still working and relevant, and should be part of your SEO strategy,

[JonathanRolande]

You can read more about the meta discription on the offical google website here

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=79812

They do use meta description, though bear in mind they don't have to. So you will find that in some rsearch results they will change it.

You can read (and watch a video) about the meta keywords here

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

That's Matt Cutts, who is head of web spam at google.

Hope that clear things up for you!

[iivgi]

thank you very much

[iivgi]

thank you very much

[WebbyNabler]

the general consensus is that Google does make use of the Description, more specifically used in the brief description in results among other user experience related items. It is widely accepted that the description is not used as a metric for ranking though. I personally take exception to this line of thought, because I have definitly seen an effect on rankings when a description has been optimized. I am not going to say this happens 100% of the time, however i have seen a direct correlation.

The keywords tag is completly irrelevant and can cause a number of problems. Two are, Bing actually considers it a spam flag and by having the keywords tags it allows competitors to easily see what you are optimizing for....as someone already mentioned. I do find it interesting that some reputable sites are using it. So perhaps i am missing out on some good info....

[JonathanRolande]

This is very interesting, I'm getting conflicting opinions from the guys here at work and on the Q&A here. Like you say, some major website use the tag as well.

It would be awesome if anyone from Moz has some actual data on this, hint, hint

[KeriMorgret]

I don't have hard data, but my understanding is that Google doesn't look at meta descriptions for rankings but they are important in helping CTR when they're shown in the SERPs.

[JonathanRolande]

Thanks Keri!