Website owners and content providers who regularly get ‘under the bonnet’ of their website may well be familiar with the following script:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”your,chosen,keywords,here” />
Well, the news is… forget it! At least as far as Google is concerned.
To those of us who optimise websites on a regular basis, this should come as little or no surprise at all… only now it’s official.
It’s important to bear in mind of course that Google neither invented the keywords meta-tag nor was the keywords meta-tag designed for Google. It simply formed part of the search engine giant’s indexing strategy in earlier years of web crawling.
Well, no more according to the official Google Webmaster Blog.
In a frank but revealing post, Google sets the record straight on a topic that many webmasters had strongly suspected for a number of years… that the keywords meta-tag, which resides in the <head> section of a web page, is now effectively redundant.
So what now? Well, you can choose to simply ignore it. Or alternatively - and this is a long shot - give some consideration to the fact that this meta-tag may just possibly be reinstated partially or in full but under the radar. So by continuing to populate your website with meta-keywords is hedging your bets.
Another consideration of course, is that this may not necessarily apply to other players in the online search space such as Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Bing.
So what’s the best course of action for webmasters now? Tell us what you think.