It has finally happened -- the guru’s behind Google have sacked the meta keywork tag in their crawls and instead rank a website based on its speed, content and availability accross the internet in addition to linkbacks. So, what does this mean for your website? -- the video and FAQ’s below will explain more.
Video by Matt Cutts at Google
Q: Does Google ever use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking?
A: In a word, no. Google’s web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in their search ranking at present.
Q: Why doesn’t Google use the keywords meta tag?
A: About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.
Q: Does this mean that Google ignores all meta tags?
A: No, Google does support several other meta tags. This meta tags page documents more info on several meta tags that they do use. For example, they do sometimes use the “description” meta tag as the text for their search results snippets. Even though they sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets they show, they still don’t use the description meta tag in their ranking.
Q: Does this mean that Google will always ignore the keywords meta tag?
A: It’s possible that Google could use this information in the future, but it’s unlikely. Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years and currently they see no need to change that policy.
Q: Torindul Designs made my website, will it now not work? Of course it will! -- the meta “keywords” tag is a small line of code that alerts search engines about your search critera. Many search engines such as Yahoo! and Ask still use this so we aren’t removing it anytime soon, but rest assured your website will remain intact. Google removed the need for the tag in their own search engine only and follow factors such as speed.
This entry was posted
on Friday 4th December 2009 and is filed under Search Engines.
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The authors of this blog are the staff from Torindul Designs.
