Monday, September 21, 2009 at 10:00 AM
Recently we received some questions about how Google uses (or more accurately, doesn't use) the "keywords" meta tag in ranking web search results. Suppose you have two website owners, Alice and Bob. Alice runs a company called AliceCo and Bob runs BobCo. One day while looking at Bob's site, Alice notices that Bob has copied some of the words that she uses in her "keywords" meta tag. Even more interesting, Bob has added the words "AliceCo" to his "keywords" meta tag. Should Alice be concerned?
At least for Google's web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is no. Google doesn't use the "keywords" meta tag in our web search ranking. This video explains more, or see the questions below.
Q: Does Google ever use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking?
A: In a word, no. Google does sell a Google Search Appliance, and that product has the ability to match meta tags, which could include the keywords meta tag. But that's an enterprise search appliance that is completely separate from our main web search. Our 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 our 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 we do use. For example, we do sometimes use the "description" meta tag as the text for our search results snippets, as this screenshot shows:
Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our 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 we see no need to change that policy.
146 comments:
I don't care to see the keywords tag influence Web search but it would be helpful to Webmasters if you used it in your Custom Search Engine solution and/or site-specific searches.
There are still people in the SEO community who wrongly say that none of the major search engines use the keywords meta tag. Both Ask and Yahoo! still seem to look at it, but of course they don't allow it to have significant influence in competitive queries.
And then is recommendable left this field empty?
by the way, your hair grows on Google very fast ;-)
Does it hurt to keep the keyword tag? I would say no. Let's call it Meta insurance. In case a service decides to use the keyword tag someday, your site is prepared.
After allot of testing and coming to the conclusion that the Meta had no real value. I thank you for the conformation.
Brad West ~ onomoney
great little video. Please do more! and twitter them!
Well, that's good to have confirmed. I have suspected it for some time now. :-)
Great video, I agree with Another Time, I would love to see more of these!
> And then is recommendable left this field empty?
No. Just leave it out. Save a dozen-or-so bytes per pageload!
I'm shocked that everybody didn't know this already. I could have sworn Google had announced, even if only unofficially, that keyword meta tags were thoroughly ignored by themselves (and other SEs have concurred).
I've not used them in years.
There is of course one excellent use of the Meta Keywords content:
Competitive keyword research: Simply visit your competitor web site, view page source, and presto: Step 1 of keyword analysis... It works surprisingly often!
Technology feels like it is moving at the speed of light! My eyes, ears and fingers are taking a toll.
Signed
Real Estate Lady
Suzy Britz
Flower Mound Texas
very informative post, keep more of them coming....
.... but still, I would rather keep keywords as a backup, just incase :)
Stopped worrying about meta tag keywords. NONE of our search results on ANY of the major SE's utilize anything in our listed keywords.
I totally agree with jordon, is like a Meta insurance, your site will be ready.
Also I think is good to use it to keep a relation between pages in a blog for example.
Great Video!
Jeez, that means I actually have to supply content, and can't spam a page to get it entered.
Come on, is this really news?
I'm happy to see them not matter anymore, considering all the past abuses. It's a shame they became the nefarious meta tag.
Regarding "Meta insurance", it still doesn't hurt to add them in an honest and useful way to begin with. Pretty straight forward: don't over do it and don't be dishonest.
I have been telling my clients not to worry about meta-tags anymore (and for quite some time), but there are few hold-outs who insist they are top priority.
I find it interesting that even though Google says they don't place any weight for rank on them, that after a site of mine went through and added them in, within weeks, they had a major jump in rank.
Coincidence? There was no other content development on this site going on simulatenously so I have to wonder, maybe just a little bit.
Your meta list doesnt include any mention of geo meta tags. Do you currently support or have any plans to support geo.position or any other geographic identifiers?
Well, I say - (2D) Keywords were out a long time ago. The new 3DKeywords or 3D Keywords are coming soon. They are basically encoded keywords making them more reliable and they can be controlled.
"I'm shocked that everybody didn't know this already."
Part of it is how indecisive Google has been in talking about this publicly. I've seen Googlers mention this in comment threads, but this is the most direct Google response to the keywords metatag question I've ever seen.
While Google may disregard this, Google is not the only search engine out there that people use! But regardless of that, I still teach my clients to include the keywords and description as an exercise in keyword density. It keeps them focused on remembering to use their targeted keywords within their content.
And as someone else said, a little insurance never hurt!
Not great news! But thanks!
You said in the video that Google will use a Meta Description if it is really "good".
First, HOW does Google decide which descriptions are "good" vs. "not so good" vs. "bad" vs. "really bad"? (Obviously, having "New Page" as a Meta Title and Meta Description are "really, really, really bad".)
Second, exactly WHAT makes a "really good" Meta Description?
I try to use 2 sentences in a Meta Description. The first sentence describes specifically what is on THIS page (example, "The Obituary of This Person, died Jan. 1, 1899, resided in X County, X State" -- and all those words are ON the specific page. The second sentence I call the "root" and includes what the whole website is about, in this case genealogy and history of X County, X State. The "Root" information is also on every page, in the form of Website Title ON each page, which is often repeated in the content. Example, my webpage title is X County... the Obituary likely repeats that the person or ancestors lived in X County. As well, the City and County Names happen to be the same Name, so that specific name gets repeated several times on the page. So does my 2-sentence Meta Description pass the "good description" test?
Please elaborate with additional short videos on this --and other--topics.
P.S. Like your Panda shirt, but on this video it looks like you have swipes of dirt on your left chest area. ;-)
P.S.S. I so wish Google would include a highlighted color in the Search Results for misspelled words on websites. What better way to encourage webmasters to proofread and spellcheck, with seeing their misspellings in some gawd-awful color. LOL
I'm forwarding this onto all my clients. I wonder if they believe me now? Could you make the post again in ALL CAPS maybe?
sure everyone knows the google doesn't use meta keywords for web search.
but the google news sitemap spec has a keywords field, does google leverage meta keywords for news search?
So what is an organization supposed to do with things like abbreviations, alternate spelling, and synonyms? This was a natural use for keywords.
I don't care about page rank here. I'm talking about letting someone search on "personnel" and find "human resources". That sort of thing.
If we don't stuff that into keywords, where do we put it?
Does google penalize sites that use Yahoo webhosting, or don't use adwords?
We didn't appear in google search results until we joined the adwords program. We became the number one hit (when our name was searched) soon after. When we suspended our adwords program, WE COMPLETELY DISAPPEARED from search results.
Maybe it is random, but the timing is strange, and it's impossible for us to fix, and it is driving me to desperate acts like posting here.
See for yourself: google "Electric Literature" and try to find electricliterature.com
@MichaelMartinez - Good point regarding the HR & Personnel search, additionally regarding the if we don't use keywords where do we put them to categorize the content.
Obviously the keywords can be spammed (by copying from other sites, or falsifying with similar domain names, designs, spam content, etc. Additionally this isn't about page rank, it's about organization of information.
Seems to make sense and I know that content is key - although isn't this somehow something that should pass into the equation? Just not carry as much weight? Or at least be included if someone searches a particular domain with Google Custom Site Search, etc.
Thoughts?
is it not clear?!? PageRank only works on luv! :D
@WCPA-Webmaster: This post talks about how to write good meta descriptions.
@Electric: No, Google does not penalize sites that use Yahoo! webhosting, or that don't use AdWords. You can post in our forum to get more detailed feedback on what may be going on with your site.
We have certainly found an increase in traffic as a result of adding keyword meta tags, so I suppose that must be other search engines.
These posts are very useful. I can understand Google's hesitance in outlining ranking criteria, but it would sure save a lot of time if they would go into greater detail on legitimate ways to increase SEO.
@brianjking - For a company that wants to organize all the data on the Web, Google seems determined not to to do a very good job of it. They confirmed somewhere that the Web search index is separate from private search indexes (like the CSEs).
It seems to me they could do a lot of good by helping Webmasters improve site search opportunities.
Of course, most site searches won't return a significant portion of site search content anyway, so I would not recommend using Google Web search for a site search tool. I believe you can purchase bandwidth from Google for a custom search solution.
I would want to use the keywords meta tag for such a solution.
We (a state university) have a GSA for our site search. It works great and gives us the functionality we need.
But the general public does search for information that universities provide. And we can't be putting all possible words into every page. For example, an article on economic history very likely isn't going to have that phrase "economic history" anywhere in its body.
Seems to me that's what meta tags are for. Yet here is Google saying that they deliberately ignore them.
That seems unfortunate at best.
And the question remains: how the heck are we supposed to mark up content so that it gets found by relevant phrases?
I doubt anyone wants me putting directly on the page
"This page is about economic history, the economy of France, the 18th century, agriculture, agricultural reform ... " well, you get the idea.
I don't want to cudgel my way to Page One. I just want to be findable.
RE: 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
Wouldn't it make more sense for Google to give credit to keywords, in Meta Keywords, that are also visible on the page and/or in the Title tag?
Thanks Matt for the official word- I know many of us had suspected this for a while, but it seems the keywords meta tag is the only bit of optimisation that the average client has ever heard of.
Recently a customer said: "Meta keywords... my friend showed me how to look that up, I'm thinking the new site should have at least 100 - can you do that?"
I'm sure other web designers can relate, and thanks for giving me something to forward to everyone that asks me to load keywords.
I believe the search system is more complicated than that. Goes with PageRank, so if the keyword isn't in the page but a link from another page has the keyword then maybe it will show in the search results, but I don't know for sure.
I say doing away with the keyword tag is the best thing any search engine can do. It is not only Google but most search engines ignore this tag anyways. Most search engines began dropping support for keywords in the late 90s and early 2000s. I'm surprised most didn't notice.
Put it this way, having the keywords tag influence search results is no different than putting a open form on your website and allowing bots and people to spam it. You might have some legit post but most post are probably going to be spam. So you think Google likes to have spam and irrelevant content in its search results. I do not think so.
I can tell where some people are coming from though, but this just calls for more intelligent ways to incorporate information into a page.
I still use keywords on my sites, I know they have no importance but it is a habit. I however don't do keywords for every page. I have the same keywords for the entire site.
Thanks matt for confirming again that Google ignores the Keywords Meta tag. The confusion starts for the meta description now.
As most of them still believe that Google will give more weight for the description in rankings. Can you also comment on this meta description tag and clear the confusion ?
Dr. Ellis L. (Skip) Knox said: "I doubt anyone wants me putting directly on the page
'This page is about economic history, the economy of France, the 18th century, agriculture, agricultural reform ... ' well, you get the idea."
Michael: Actually, that would be perfectly fine. You would in no way be "cudgeling" your way to the top. Rather, you would be helping the search engine show people what your page is about.
nice T-shirt)
This post saved my hours. Thank you for revealing.
i have seen this type of posts in forums that google does not use keyword meta tag, but i think thr is no harm to use keyword meta tag.
OMFG... Google havent supported this since before 1999... how come its still on the radar as an issue?
Okay..the confirmation comes just now! I thought it was long since it was confirmed and had never actually ever had any meta tags on my websites.
The meta tags support page you've linked is out of date since support for canonical meta tag has been added since.
Just woke up 2 minutes ago, so I'm not sure how coherent this'll read. I'm going to give'r anyway.
Meta tags, in my experience, are still referenced by Bing and other search engines.
As for leaving keywords in for "Meta Insurance"? No sure about that. Do so leaves an easy way for competitors to find out what keywords your going after.
But all in all, I say use 'em. Stick misspellings in there, or experiment with long tail phrases.
And to Mr. Cutts, I am a fan and admirer. In all your communications you seem like a warm and friendly person, even to cats :) You are a good role model for young people (and everyone else for that matter.)
Completely appreciate Google's continued transparency. Saddens me that this stance was taken due to blackhat practices and unethical webmasters and SEO consultants.
My thanks to Matt and Google for continuing to provide quality instructions and information for us whitehat consultants to follow.
I had heard that but, just to be safe, I'm leaving them.
It is really nice information, in fact today we had little discussion with my friends. This information clear my doubts about keywords tag i will keep it in mind.
I think i'll leave my keywords alone for now. why? one of our sites is the first result for relvevant searches with bing et al but languishes somewhere around p30 or lower on google :(
Can we just leave it empty then? As in is it REALLY useless for Google?
Please stop posting videos. They take too long to list to. Instead, take the time to post them in text format. Your readers will thank you. As a bonus, your blog will be found more easily in search engines.
This is old news! Apparently there are some less sophisticated search engines that may pay attention though? Either way I gave up using them when Google did. It seems that when you use 'tags' for pages it is the same principle yet can be much more useful for a user.
also if you leave the tags in, would users of other search enginesfind you, hopefully link to the site which should raise your position in the google serps
Thank you Michael, that tells me what I needed. Namely: while "Google does not" use keywords meta tag in web ranking -- how could you say it any more clearly? -- that is NOT a reason to abandon keywords altogether. They are still indexed and searchable, and so still have a function.
They simply are not part of the mysterious algebra of page ranking.
It's not your fault that people persist in misunderstanding (me included, initially!) your statement.
You may like to know that there is at least one site that belongs to Google which still uses meta keywords, and that one site is YouTube.
Not only on each video permalink (where meta keywords match those tags added by user), but also on YouTube's home page, the meta keyword tag is there.
Thanks for the video and comments. There is still so much misconception by businesses that own websites that "updating their meta tags" will improve their site positioning. We spend considerable time with every client educating them about how Google really works.
Thank you for writing such an informative article! I'm going to apply some changes to my employer's website right now. =)
We knew about the keywords meta tag, but the real news is that the description meta tag is not used for ranking at all.
It has always been my understanding that Google ignored it. And it has always been my practice to include it because I think it is a basic best practice when it comes to proper web design.
Well I think it's great that this has finally been said. It sure will make it easier for folks who tend to get their shorts in a bunch over the details of SEO. Now we can just worry about things like no-follow tags and plural versus singular.
Hi Matt thankx for the update and although Google expressed a lot that content and a unique website is a pre, description and keywords can be find everywere on the Net a unique website with unique content not.
best regards as always Frank
This is not new news..
but if you omit the keywords field meta tag on your websites you are a fool.
Testing has been done multiple times over that shows a unique KW phrase in the keywords field will rank for #1 in google in isolation.
it's going to take about 12 weeks,
but it still works.
now if you put copyrighted words or trademarks ANYWHERE in yoru website you are a FOOL and subject to DMCA or copyright lawsuits.
The solutions is...
DON'T USE TRADEMARKS OR COPYRIGHTED WORDS UNLESS YOU OWN © or ™
@steveplunkett
This is News?
ROTFLMAO ...
EB
I would like to see a metadata-only search engine, that uses the title, keywords and description to categorise works. The keyword weighting would sum to 1.0 and would be grammatically aware in as many languages as possible. For example a PhD thesis on the likelihood of it actually "Raining cats and dogs" might have in it's keywords, "probability, rain, cat, cats, dog, dogs". The keyword parser would assign 0.25 to each of probability, rain, cat and dog, and discard cats and dogs as duplicate. This way, works that spam the keywords field dilute the value of each word as the list grows bigger, and may place their paper under the wrong headings.
Thanks for the useful information.
As long as there is no harm in using meta tag, then I am less worried about it.
Google keeps changing its methods every now and then and this makes it difficult for many to keep up with Google.
I want to make a complaint.
This blog:
"http://www.paneduc.com.br/blog/ouvir-musicas-japonesas-gratis-free-full-download-blog-money-make-dinheiro-online-paypal-seo.html"
Are copying all my articles
and is spamming the url to the search engines google, my blog has has exactly 341 articles published since last year, reaching around 720 daily visits and such visits suddenly disappeared from one moment to another, simply because this blog is spam copying all my articles and publishing in the wordpress platform which is much better indexed by search engines. Now I want to know how do I report it to blog that he remove the copies that made all my posts. Someone could help me, The url address of my blog: it http://blogando20.blogspot.com
and one of my articles plagiarized by this idiot was this:
http://blogando20.blogspot.com/2009/04/ouvir-musicas-japonesas.html
Compare the urls:
Blogging http://blogando20.blogspot.com/2009/04/ouvir-musicas-japonesas.html = 2.0 = original
Paneduc / blog = "http://www.paneduc.com.br/blog/ouvir-musicas-japonesas-gratis-free-full-download-blog-money-make-dinheiro-online-paypal-seo.html" = copying, plagiarism, etc.
As long as "keywords" metatag is not penalized, you should continue using it.
What if google decides to give it some value one year from now? Are you going to go back to all of your sites and re-write code?
So, just leave it there as long as it does not harm you.
This post has generated lots of comment, which is kind of surprising as it should be old news.
However, from all the above comments, only 2 pick up the throw-away line about the description metatag which seems much more significant...
Remember this is just what Google uses.
Bing, Yahoo and Apple's new search engine may all use this tag.
Gary
http://GarySaid.com/
PS - Just kidding about the Apple engine, but you never know.
I knew about this meta tag keyword exclusion but I never knew about the description tag only being used sometimes. It makes me wonder if the little fish really has a chance with a new site in the big pond.
I wondered if shop website's are treated differently from standard websites too. I have a mail order lingerie 2 order website and I would obviously like to gain some tips of how I could legally increase my pagerank.
To DigãodaWeb said..
Report it to Wordpress. Someone did that to me, too, and after I reported it Wordpress shut them down. Took only a few days. Good luck.
Wow... I mean, is this really news to anyone?
Ultimately I use the keywords tag for my own amusement, but that's it. Some might argue that I'm letting all and sundry know which words I'm targeting, but I just see it as easy tagging for myself.
At least now I can point clients to this post and say, "Google says it doesn't matter - so I'm not going to stuff it!"
But see there is a website called discountsindia.com which does not have any content in it, but ranks high in the search results. How is it possible if google deos not look into meta tag and meta description
Thanks Matt for posting this great info.
But I will still use it until or unless it kill my pages.
Cant we all just get along?
Someone is using them! And you know what, if put some "basic, general, generic keywords on your site you will be fine."
There are plenty of other things that you can do to help with SEO besides the keyword meta tag.
Good information, thanks for that. This is eye opener, i got a lot of ads telling me to pay them to rewrite my mata tag to improve my ranking.
But still you should keep the meta tags for other search engines, right?
So what is the use to place Meta Keywords in websites???
Matt Cutts! Thanks for the update. Very informative post, in this time technology demand changes as speed of light!
I agree that the meta tags don't directly effect page rank, but they do increase Google's awareness of the content on the page... which in turn can effect where your site ranks based on the words used in your "natural search" done on Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. This is especially true for flash sites that don't use technologies that allow search engines to read their pages.
Also, the article is about the "keywords" meta tag only. Some of the posts seem to reflect their thoughts on all of the tags commonly used.
Many other search engine use it.
Thanks for finally nailing that question. We've known it for ages, but glad to have "official" confirmation.
I have suspected that the 'key word' meta tag had little 'juice' with Google. Good to hear from the 'horses mouth'!
Troy posted: "Also, the article is about the "keywords" meta tag only. Some of the posts seem to reflect their thoughts on all of the tags commonly used."
===
More important than "keywords", the video brought up META DESCRIPTION-- just a one line mention but an important mention.
Seems we could all benefit more from focusing on improving how we write the "Description" tag, rather than debating what Google has said about how THEY treat keywords (Google isn't writing about Yahoo or another search engine! Google told what Google does with keywords. But Google also made an important point about Meta Description, but the point is being lost -- like muddy boot-steps obscuring everything on the floor, including the "design".
Google is basically saying, we focus on CONTENT wherein "keywords" are appropriately used, along with a well-written META DESCRIPTION (which should likely should use some of the same "keywords" used in the CONTENT). When writing a Meta Description, think "what is unique about THIS page", and make sure that the same subject is presented well in the content. If website "XYZ" is for light bulbs, but THIS page focuses on why the new light bulb styles are better than the old style, the Meta Description should reflect that point (no pun intended).
Rocking Guy: "So what is the use to place Meta Keywords in websites???"
Michael: Other search engines (including Ask and Yahoo!) still look at the meta keywords tag, so it is still useful to include it on your pages.
But if you're using a site search tool that makes use of the meta keywords tag, you should make full use of the tag for site search and not worry about which major search engines honor it.
SEOs who advise people not to use the meta keywords tag are at best giving out useless advice and at worst giving out bad advice.
Search engine optimization is not all about Google -- it is all about SEARCH.
Let me get this straight... Key words/phrases mean nada. Seldom do meta descriptions. Content is king.
I assume meta titles, text titles, h1 tags, etc still do. Big debate about whether alts do. How about image and other graphic file names? Or directory names...
To me there are some major concerns. Yes, yes I'm aware of Google's semantic ability, however I'm not sure it's as advanced as they imply. If not, well written content that is not overly redundant will not get the job done. I don't need to remind everybody how many beautiful potentially effective well written sites there are out there that are never found because of SEO issues.
If little by little only visible elements of a website will determine organic ranking, Google better step up it's semantic abilities very quickly, or we will have the first three pages of any search overrun by "less than pertinent" websites. Wait a minute... on second thought let's not go there.
My gut feeling is that although Google would love to totally do away with relying on any meta info for ranking, until they have designed the "perfect" semantic machine, the key will remain the interrelationship of meta data, various tags, file names, and the visible content.
I completely agree with jordan
I'm surprised to see this is a youtube video and not a google video
!
Beyond how useful keywords are for search engine rankings, I do believe they contribute to your critical thinking. The exercise of identifying meaningful keywords (and description) gives you an opportunity to distance yourself of the copy-editing of your content and analyze it from a different perspective. Keywords give you the oportunity to become your own judge of your content and review its quality. It is up to you to be thorough, consistent and why not- honest!
I do not mind it.
i don't belive this is a fresh news...
Well then why bother with mete tags t all then if they're not used. I dont get it. Jean Carl Parisien
Does Adsense look at the keyword tags to generate relevant ads then? It may still help making a few extra bucks to keep the keyword tags on your site if it has joined Adsense or any other similar ad programs tho.
I fully agree that the keyword meta tag should be kept as it doesn't cause any harm to the ranking result.
In addition, although Google don't consider it, other search engines (e.g. Yahoo, Bing) may still using it as one of their evaluating factors.
thanks for confirming our thoughts as well ... to some degree this ends a series of debate ;)
finally I understand that all the myth they say is not right.
Can you tell us on what other basis are websites rank well in Google?
Google seems to value websites like digg, facebook and other social networking sites highly as compared to others. Is it because of the number of visitors they get (popularity) or their well defined meta tags?
Can you please tell me why google blocked the IP of a request to have illegal material removed. This is violating our national defamation and privacy laws. We submitted a request and we informed by email to resubmit in the form required by google.
We resubmitted several times after legal consultation and sent it by fax. We used an email delivery/read confirmation service and sent the resubmitted request from two email addresses on the one computer. It was not delivered ergo google just blocked the IP.
The illegal material was published on a site, ripoff report, that google ranks above links to professional information.
The information was libelous and contravened the privacy rights of a person. It was not about a business. It included identification and contact information of the victim. It asked people to harass them. This occurred.
The original request containing the information demonstrated that it was highly illegal. The email confirmation showed that the removals team had read the original request.
In short, google just replied to the original request with a request to resubmit and then blocked the IP address. Can you please tell me why?
Susan wrote: Can you please tell me why google blocked the IP of a request to have illegal material removed. (rest snipped)
==
I would think your attorney could send a letter directly to Google's US Mail address. That would be my next step, if it was me.
Yes, it will be.
Google removals staff read the original request and therefore they are informed as per law.
I cannot inderstand why they then request a rewrite and blocked the IP.
Maybe it was to ignore it. Under our laws this is illegal and that was pointed out in the original (read and relied) notice.
Yeah i discovered that in 2006 http://forums.seroundtable.com/showthread.php?t=698 nobody took me seriously then :(
My question is how can google espouse 'do no evil' and net safety and then just disregard national laws designed to protect individuals emotional and physical safety? We are not talking about a company but an individual whose well-being is severely compromised and that was made clear in the original request.
Google Web Crawler has lost it's mind. I have gone through all the pages and links for proper linking on both my websites. I do know that the pages being reported by Google Web Crawler where never there to start with and I can't find any of the links that Google Web Crawl is reporting as an Error. Where is Web Crawler picking them up from? There not even on the pages Google Web Crawler reporting them to be on.
I have a question for the users on this site. I have recently set up a website for a remodeling and construction business. Until last week they were ranked number one when searching remodeling olathe, ks. Now, they are ranked #47. Can someone explain what may have contributed to this change?
Well, you can sue any one for any reason if moneys the answer. Key words should be free to any one as words are used every day. If they then freedom of speech is out the door. Key Words are not the answer, Google can tell you that, and I can to.
There were rumors about this issue, but now it's official.
Thanks for the info!
Well, you can sue any one for any reason if moneys the answer....
Reputation is more important to most than money
other factor is your page size, image optimization, inter linking of pages, your content relevancy, keyword density, proximity, relevancy with content.
lot's of people are arguing about weight of this or that in the ranking algorithm.
Fair enough, because google's ranking is a bit like Coca-cola's composition : We more or less know what's in it, but we don't have the exact formula for it...
And I guess that at least Coke's formula does not change every day !
Oops, it looks like we accidentally removed the following post (sorry about this):
tantek said...
Matt, thanks for confirming this. I blogged about the fact that Google ignored/ignores meta keywords four years ago,
Principles of visibility and human friendliness
and it is good to see this officially confirmed.
Keep up the good work, and keep preferring visible data to invisible/dark metadata.
Thanks,
-Tantek
ya i was thinking so from many days , but i don't know why my SEO company still using this strategy .
is it a need to put or better to ignore fully .
Just let me know ...
Was unaware of this. I thought keywords would still be of some relevance to the site content itself for indexing purposes.
Who cares what Google consider? I am never.
it seems good news to avoid spam
Interesting post and amazingly loooooong thread here!! I guess the best way to do SEO is still to create good relationships with real people or write useful and good stuff that you know about. That way people will naturally connect to you because you are offering them something good or useful to them, which in turn will definitely give you positive results :-)
It would have been better ig Google and all SEs found a way to penalise the abusers rather than disregard elements designed for users' benefit. Such a solution would also have enabled you to penalise those who abuse the user through 'keyword packing'. If it is not true natural language and does not make sense to an ordinary user then it should loose it's page rank all together.
A great blog. This is great info I was not aware of. Now I know why a lot of my blogs are on page 1 of Google. I thought I must be doing something right. All the best.
So many people are misquoting this blog article to say "Google ignores meta tags", instead of specifing the keyword meta tag. Could you put it in bold or something Matt?
This one is really great work for avoid from spammer. But till now most of website and blog use meta tag on their website or blog.
It seems that some websites start to use the description tag as the keyword tag. Instead of a message to the user, i see they only include keywords!! Not only that but many of these websites rank in the first pages too! Ok other factors help too but shouldn't they be penalized for stuffing the description tag??
This helps a lot, but clients are still not ready to believe of we do not show them the reference. But this article helps then..thanks
I was searching at google how long meta keywords should be, as i was creating meta tags for one of my new website. thanks to google that i will not have to preapre meta keywords again. a lot of time will be saved to concentrate on content. cool!
What confuses me about this is the effect not using Keywords has on "Landing Pages". Pages that are specically used for Selling a product/service, especially if you use PPC (Pay per click advertising).
I understand that content is King, but maybe I am getting confused with Page ranking and Quality Score when using PPC.
It also concerned me to see the refrerance to www.discountsindia.com. I checked it out and agree, it has no content, yet is ranked high by Google. I hope I am wrong when I think we may be fed some disinformation here.
Hi Sir Matt.
I just wondering if Google website optimizer are helpful to my site. Do you think that it can help to get more high ranking is some keywords if I used google website optimizer?
Regards
Lloyd Herrera
My site's ranking has dropped significantly even after doing regular link building through article syndication, blogging, social book marketing, directory submissions to relevant categories and other related off-page techniques.
Plz suggest?
I am just filling my web-site product keywords meta tag, useful for e-commerce social community in which product can be tagged. Some of those new community allow to be tag only pics of product in which the page has got the keywords meta tag
very good situation to determine the keywords in Google. Irrelevant keywords will hamper the use of algorithms
very nice and helpful post.
Thanks. I have removed my keywords tag from my sites like DesiChords and its HELPED me. Is it now a negative indicator?
How long has this been the case? Nice to know the others do use it. When used responsibly it serves a purpose. Perhaps limit the number of characters that are read by the spiders after the meta tag? dunno.
And what about metatags inside self-hosted video's?
Can we used them by the encoding of the video's of must we leave it?
But still i am using the meta, i am planing to change the meta(remove).
jordon said...
Does it hurt to keep the keyword tag? I would say no. Let's call it Meta insurance. In case a service decides to use the keyword tag someday, your site is prepared.
I agree 100%
I say BS.
I use the keyword meta tag, I rely on them. And Google always finds my sites because of it. Yes I do get top rankings. How else is google going to know to list your site for a resultts page only in description? The is bs.
I did experiment some days back. I put unique code say "hg3fw1sd" in meta description of my index page and another unique one in meta keyword tag.
what i find that for meta description code google showing site on top and for yahoo,msn its keyword's code for which it was showing site on top that shows that google give importance to description and yahoo,msn give importance to keywords also.
Hello Matt, I was wondering about blogsearch. Does that look at the keyword meta tags? Does it have another way of looking at the way the blogger tags the post?
I was trying a lot of suggestions from so called SEO experts and modified my pages as per their suggestion. But found no happy result. I left to see their view and started to write site contents for users. When my site visitors starts to rate my page good and starts to share with their friends and other web sites, I found good result.
Google is more sincere search engine which puts maximum efforts to provide real search result. thanks for all.
In fact metatags have no relevance if not related to page content.
This post is very nice but nothing more than that.
Well, I`ve heard that Google take no notice of the keyword meta tag, but now it`s come from the "horse`s mouth" so to speak it`s conclusive.
Then how Google rank site in SERP. Is it ranking based on Pr or no. of unique visitors or domain name. Still confusing. How to optimize site to get good ranking in Google Search Engine.
Google not give propriety to the meta keywords. It never mean this tags has not values for website. But this tags is very helpful in Yahoo search..
thanks for the update and the link to the meta tags that are used.
Even though Google doesn't use the keywords tag, I still insert it in my webpages. Other search engines do, and like Michael said, it's good for custom searches or searches within a site. It doesn't hurt to put them in and I think they are still important. I just wrote an article about Keywords: The 5 W's and a tutorial for Dreamweaver on how to insert them. If you are interested: http://www.here2helpservices.com/BusTips/KeywordsThe-5-W-s.html
You need to post meta-tag keywords, as all the search engines in some form or another evaluate what the other is indexing. There is way to much information still organized off meta-data to ignore adding keywords to your meta-tags.
Even if Google claims they are not using the keyword meta-tag they are still indexing information from sites that may be categorizing content based on meta-tag data. We would advise to still take the meta-tag keyword data seriously. This is a basic piece of information that can have positive effects on someone or a robot's ability to index your information for related keywords.
Does Google pay any attention to so-called keyword-rich directory names? There is an SEO company currently making a mess out of one of my websites putting every page in a subdirectory with a keyword-rich name. They claim this causes Google to give the pages higher ranks. Is this true or is it nonsense?
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