Yahoo Discontinues Meta Keyword Tag..or Does It?
By: John Elder posted in SEO
Hello good people!
There’s one ongoing debate in the world of SEO that never seems to go away.
Meta Keyword tag…do they or don’t they use it?!
The “they” is, of course, the search engines. Google has long since stopped indexing the Meta Keyword tag (or maybe never did to begin with) and Bing doesn’t use it…but Yahoo….well….
A couple weeks ago, (October 6th, 2009 to be exact) at SMX East during the “Ask the Search Engines” section, Cris Pierry the Senior Director for search at Yahoo stated that Yahoo had quietly stopped supporting the tag several months ago….
Yay! The debate is finally over! No major search engine uses that Meta Keyword Tag! We can finally put that dog to rest! Or can we?
Just a few days later, Danny Sullivan over at SearchEngineLand.com ran a simple little test that showed Yahoo still does, in fact, index the keyword meta tag.
Whoops.
So what’s the story? Well, Yahoo clarified with this statement sent to Danny Sullivan:
What changed with Yahoo’s ranking algorithms is that while we still index the meta keyword tag, the ranking importance given to meta keyword tags receives the lowest ranking signal in our system.
Words that appear in any other part of documents, including the body, title, description, anchor text etc., will take priority in ranking the document – the re-occurrence of these words in the meta keyword tag will not help in boosting the signal for these words. Therefore, keyword stuffing in the keyword tag will not help a page’s recall or ranking, it will actually have less effect than introducing those same words in the body of the document, or any other section.
However, when no other ranking signal is present, unique words that only appear in the meta keyword tag section of documents can still be used to recall these documents.
Well there you go…they still index it, but don’t put much importance behind it…but they still index it so you should still use it. Bottom line, we have to keep using the silly thing.
Great.
What do you think about the Keyword Meta Tag? Comment Below….
-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!
