It might be a surprise for many people but the meta keywords are still used by some search engines as a part of their ranking process.
Major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing no longer use it but other small search engines such as Yandex, Baidu, and DuckDuckGo still use it.
Don’t confuse between meta keywords and other meta tags. Other meta tags like Page title and description are still used by Google, Yahoo, and Bing and are valuable for SEO but meta keywords are not.
In this post, you will learn everything about meta keywords and meta tags.
What are meta keywords?
Meta keywords are added to the head of a page and look like this:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”meta keywords, meta tags, SEO, search engine optimization”/>
The name of the meta tag is keywords and the value is defined in the content part.
In the content part, you’re supposed to include keywords that you used on the page for search engine rankings.
SERPs read the meta keywords tag as part of the crawling and indexing and use them for the ranking process.
Like meta tags, meta keywords are not visible to the user as they are included in the page’s source code.
To view meta keywords you can check on Source code or use tools like SEO Quake.
Why Meta keywords are No Longer Relevant?
As you may have just speculated, having the keywords you needed a page to rank in a meta tag, made it exceptionally simple to control search algorithms and soon enough individuals turning over spamming web indexes.
The outcome is that the major search engines chose to drop meta keywords and expel them from their positioning process.
Specifically:
- Google dropped meta keywords in 2009
- Yahoo quit utilizing meta keywords in 2009
- Bing declared in 2014 that they never again consider meta keywords for ranking purposes
Which Search Engines still use Meta Keywords?
Yandex- It is the most popular Russian search engine that is using meta keywords as a way to determine the page’s relevance to search queries.
Baidu- It is the most popular Chinese search engine, and is also using the meta keywords on websites during the crawling and ranking phase.
What Google Does Do?
As for Google, meta keywords are no longer valid, there are some other meta’s that are important for Google rankings.
Title Tag:
<title> Meta Keywords Still Used by Other Search Engines </title>
Meta Descriptions Tag:
<meta name=”description” content=” According to the new SEO techniques, Meta keywords are not used by Google, Bing, and Yahoo but they are taken into account by other search engines.”/>
- These give search engines a big clue as to what the page is about.
- Tags can be seen in SERP results.
- It is also used as a snippet while sharing a website URL on social media channels,
Final Points:
Using Meta keywords was the SEO technique in the past for Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Other SERPs like Yandex and Baidu still consider them into account.
If you’re working as an SEO Company in the USA you should include meta tags for search engine rankings.
As a technical SEO audit give special attention to your meta title tags, meta description tags, and meta robots tags.
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Last Updated: April 4, 2022