Google Addresses Their Stance on KeywordsIn case you haven’t heard already, the Gospel According to Matt Cutts has spoken, and the truth is out: Keyword meta tags don’t matter - at least to Google. Long thought to be a playground for spammers to stuff irrelevant or unnecessary terms into a web page’s backend to make it rank higher in organic searches, Google announced last Monday (and Cutts followed up on his own blog) that the web’s leading search engine actually pays no mind to that part of the game.
You can find Google’s whole rundown here, but the essence of their organic search is pretty much summed up by this little Cutts snippet:
Google uses over two hundred signals in our web search rankings, but the keywords meta tag is not currently one of them, and I don’t believe it will be.
Now, this certainly doesn’t mean that you should forgo this step in your SEO efforts. Bing has made it known recently that they still place a heavy emphasis on meta tag keywords, and it’s long been known that Yahoo! values the process, as well.
The search engine game is a mad dash to figuring out how to make organic searches as humanistic as possible. Google’s recent announcement is nothing new, but it does demand that we ask the question: Are Cutts and company playing chess while everyone else is stuck on checkers?