• Natural Search Blog , Wednesday, September 17, 2008 12:33 PM

There has been a sustained debate about the merits of the meta keywords tag, and Chris Silver Smith argues that the tags aren't even worth the effort it takes to create them in this post. In fact, in some cases, he says a poorly optimized meta keywords tag could actually get a site penalized.

Smith's reasoning stems from an extensive post by Danny Sullivan that found that Yahoo and Ask are the only two engines that factor the tags into the ranking process -- albeit as a last resort. "If they can't find content matching a keyword search through other, preferable signals such as visible page body text, they might only then fall back on meta keyword content," he says. "In this case, if you already have the terms in the visible text of the page, it's just not necessary to have it in the Meta Keywords tag - your page likely won't rank any better than it already does."

Google and Live Search, on the other hand, don't use the meta keywords tag to determine favorable rankings at all. But Google may actually be crawling the tags to help assess whether a page has been over-optimized by spammers, and that's where a well-meaning Webmaster could wind up in trouble. "Pages with unrelated words in the meta keyword content or which are stuffed too much might be singled out for lower quality scores or penalizations," he says.

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