Why would one of the big 4 banks in Australia recently start defining meta-keywords?

[CFCU]

Hi All,

Hope everyone had a nice weekend.  I just stumbled upon one of our competitors who for some reason is all of a sudden defining meta keywords for their product pages.

I find this extremely strange since its a definite no-no to define these?

They are one of the largest (Chase, Barclays equivalent) in Australia with a large digital team.  Do they know something we don't?

Hope someone can help.

Cheers,

Dave

[EGOL]

They have zero fear of people who use meta keywords as a data source.

[CFCU]

Who has zero fear? the bank? Google?

[EGOL]

The bank.

I have keyword meta information on some of my sites.  I doubt that it has any negative value with the search engines.  I don't think it is helpful with any search engines that produce significant traffic in the United States.

The people who look at it might get "some idea" of the keywords that the page targets, but anyone with any skill can look at the title and the visible on-page and know what the real targets are without looking at the meta.  The meta is smoke.  The short tail is the small part of the target, that's whats in the meta.    The long tail is where the money is.

[CFCU]

My thoughts exactly - as long as they haven't found out something new about the meta , its all good.

It just seems silly for them to all of a sudden define them .

Cheers mate

[MoosaHemani]

Hello David,

In my experience, Meta keywords have no negative impact on rankings and neither positive. I certainly agree with EGOL that if you are smart, title tags are good for you understand what the page is targeting any ways…

I personally don’t think there is something they know and we don’t but yeah as you said they are banks, they care less about what other people extract from their data as they are number one (or they easily can outrank their competitors) because of huge budgets and talented big teams.

They may be using wrong keywords in their Meta keywords to misguide people who believe too much on meta keywords of competitors. (possibilities)

I think in the world of today, using or not using Meta keyword has no huge benefits… just a thought!

Hope this helps!

[BradsDeals]

Just because they're a bank with a large digital team doesn't mean they put so much thought into it, and I'm willing to bet that's the case. Maybe someone noticed an empty field in their CMS and took it upon themselves to fill it in. Maybe the digital team fought a losing battle with an exec and shrugged it off because it was an easy way to make a C-level happy without actually hurting anything. It doesn't matter because it's neither good nor bad.

Also, don't put any stock into the hype around the thinking that someone might use it to "steal" your keywords. Have you ever actually heard of a case where this happened? Where it hurt someone? No. It's a ghost story that SEOs have been parroting for years, probably based on some long ago throwaway speculation. Besides, you're a bank. No one needs to snoop around in your code to know what your target keywords are when it's that straightforward.

[seo_plus]

first - a question - are they doing this intelligently?  meaning are the keyword tags unique or reasonably unique to the page at hand?

if so, here might be 2 good reasons:

1 - They use them internally as a simple way for lower level people to understand what the page is "for"

2 - They use them as part of content curation or internal search

if not, then they may be generally not paying attention and some CMS technician is just filling in the boxes.