Useless to Google and MSN, but still used by Yahoo, the meta keyword tag gets dusted off and tested for 2009.
8 Comments
8 Comments
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Comments
I’m going to Sphinn this because you are a brave soul devoting that much space to the META Keywords Element in 2009, bravo! But, I do believe your test is faulty. I never believed in the obscure keyword test, it doesn’t work. If the META Keyword Element value is .25 and you are trying to rank an obscure word or words, you’ll need a bit more than a weak reference in the KW tag for it to work. Now, what if the element were used as an additional signal if all else on the page was Kosher? And what if that extra signal was "just enough" to tip the balance somewhere? And let’s say that balance is in Yahoo! or some other SE. They all tend to end up in each others indices at times, it is a shared experience. Don’t neglect other sources of traffic. They all end up in the Gorg at some point. Why does Google have to spell things out for us? There are many things they don’t list in their documents that have an effect on a pages performance. No one knows for sure on this one and I don’t think we’ll ever find out unless Google writes a Blog Post about it some day. :)
Thanks pageoneresults!I really wanted to prove how devalued this tag is, in terms of trying to rank, not only for my own curiousity, but also to have a post out there for biz owners who might be considering using an SEO who is trying to sell them on this faulty advice (that this tag will work wonders, etc.). My intent was never to actually be able to rank for it, I would have been very surprised if I had!
don’t use the keyword tag to rank, use it for database inclusion.
I Sphunn this because your investigation was facebreakingly good. Personally I use meta tags as a sort of note pad to remind me what I am optimizing for. Roger often forgets what he has done several months or hours after the fact.
@steveplunkett I didn’t get into it in my post, but I feel strongly that this tag could be used by the engines for much more than discovery, without adding any weight neccessarily. Just as a book has an index to find relevent content, an updated the meta keyword tag could be used to point bots in the right direction. dB inclusion sounds about right in this case study.
@RogerRager Thanks for your kind words! I agree, there is potential with this tag, even for our own use, and SEOs should own it, since the likes of Google have abandoned it.
"Personally I use meta tags as a sort of note pad to remind me what I am optimizing for."I prefer to manage keyword/URL records in Excel.
@Halfdeck I think excel is the go-to software of choice for many of our tasks.