Is Meta Keywords Important For Websites?
-
Hi,
I understand that meta title and descriptions are very important for websites.
I would like to know if meta keywords are important?
I have seen people talking about meta keywords are useless and it should be removed from the website to prevent competitors from knowing your keywords.
Anyone has anything to share?
-
Thank you for your feedback John!
-
Google doesn't use them at all. Bing uses them, but mostly as a spam signal (see here). I wouldn't bother with them.
-
Got it thank you!
-
Thanks for the tips.
-
Hi
For the official line on meta keywords form Google, I've attached this link:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
Google officially announced in 2009 that meta keywords was not a factor in ranking at all. I also believe that the description isn;t a ranking factor - the reason you need to focus on the description is to ensure that it has a strong hook that accurately reflects the content of the page to entice the searcher to click on the link.
-
Hello,
Sure, meta keywords are not important for google bot, but for other search engines it does. Yahoo, bing and other smaller search robots do care about these keywords. They help them associate the indexed content to the right keywords, at least in the starting phase. So, if you want to get rankings only in google and not in other search engine, remove the meta keywords.
-
Thank you. I have removed the meta keywords on my website.
I guess Google doesnt give alot of weight to meta keywords. -
Definitely not important. I still add them in because I think it helps our content writers structure the page and some minor search engines use them. I know some people think they can actually cause harm and don't use them at all. Whatever you do, make sure not to spend too much time on them and not to keyword stuff.
The only time they have any relevance is if you are using them for Google news.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Multiple Websites Under Single Brand
My company has many websites having similar content . They are into the retail business and sell manufactured homes. Since they sell different manufacturer homes products having different specification in different states that's why they have created many websites. Will duplicate design and similar content on some of the pages across multiple website will cause issues in Google ranking.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | christmaslaserlights0 -
Keyword stuffing?
Hi Guys, I'm working on an site which faces some ranking problems. Although some of the problems have been mapped and will get fixed in the future I’m wondering if you could give me an second opinion on the amount of keywords used on the website. Although the texts reads “OK” I’m wondering if the site could experience negative influences of the amount of keywords used. Website: http://premium-hookahs.nl/ Main keyword: waterpijp / shisha Besides the general keyword the secondary keywords get used a lot on category and product pages. I would love to hear your opinion!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Bob_van_Biezen0 -
Sudden Drop in Website Traffic Last month
Can any one help me. One of my website http://www.imperialcard.com.au/ suddenly started to drop in traffic and ranking. I havent done anything black hat. How do I figure out what caused this. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Verve-Innovation0 -
Not ranking for keywords. wehhh
I am not ranking for any of my keywords despite getting a number of Backlinks to my pages and mentioning them in both content and meta tags?!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Johnny_AppleSeed0 -
Website "A Record" in DNS - Geotargetting
Hi, Our online shop is hosted with a French IP address. It is available in English and Spanish. I have noticed, as to be expected, that we get quite a few french visitors, probably related to our IP address Google must think its geo related. We don't want to particularly target any specific country, but more so english and spanish speakers. Can you have various A records around the world to help with this? Any suggestions or things I could look into?? thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Rel Noindex Nofollow tag vs meta noindex nofollow robots
Hi Mozzers I have a bit of thing I was pondering about this morning and would love to hear your opinion on it. So we had a bit of an issue on our client's website in the beginning of the year. I tried to find a way around it by using wild cards in my robots.txt but because different search engines treat wild cards differently it dint work out so well and only some search engines understood what I was trying to do. so here goes, I had a parameter on a big amount of URLs on the website with ?filter being pushed from the database we make use of filters on the site to filter out content for users to find what they are looking for much easier, concluding to database driven ?filter URLs (those ugly &^% URLs we all hate so much*. So what we looking to do is implementing nofollow noindex on all the internal links pointing to it the ?filter parameter URLs, however my SEO sense is telling me that the noindex nofollow should rather be on the individual ?filter parameter URL's metadata robots instead of all the internal links pointing the parameter URLs. Am I right in thinking this way? (reason why we want to put it on the internal links atm is because the of the development company states that they don't have control over the metadata of these database driven parameter URLs) If I am not mistaken noindex nofollow on the internal links could be seen as page rank sculpting where as onpage meta robots noindex nofolow is more of a comand like your robots.txt Anyone tested this before or have some more knowledge on the small detail of noindex nofollow? PS: canonical tags is also not doable at this point because we still in the process of cleaning out all the parameter URLs so +- 70% of the URLs doesn't have an SEO friendly URL yet to be canonicalized to. PSS: another reason why this needs looking at is because search engines won't be able to make an interpretation of these pages (until they have been cleaned up and fleshed out with unique content) which could result in bad ranking of the pages which could conclude to my users not being satisfied, so over and above the SEO factor, usability of the site is being looked at here as well, I don't want my users to land on these pages atm. If they navigate to it via the filters then awesome because they are defining what they are looking for with the filters. Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks, Chris Captivate.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DROIDSTERS0 -
Google Penguin w/ Meta Keywords
It's getting really hard filtering through the Penguin articles flying around right now so excuse me if this has been addressed: I know that Google no longer uses the meta keywords as indicators (VERY old news). But I'm just wondering if they are starting to look at them as a bigger spam indicator since Penguin is looking at over-optimization. If yes, has anyone read good article indicating so? The reason I ask is because I have two websites, one is authoritative and the other… not so much. Recently my authoritative website has taken a dip in rankings, a significant dip. The non-authoritative one has increased in rankings… by a lot. Now, the authoritative website pages that use meta-keywords seem to be the ones that are having issues… so it really has me wondering. Both websites compete with each other and are fairly similar in their offerings. I should also mention that the meta-keywords were implemented a long time ago… before I took over the account. Also important to note, I never purchase links and never practice any spammy techniques. I am as white hat as it gets which has me really puzzled as to why one site dropped drastically.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BeTheBoss0 -
Buying a website and redirecting everything
We are considering purchasing an existing website in our industry with a domain authority of 52 and 20K inlinks and redirecting it to our new website with a domain authority of 26 and 1,000 inlinks. Would this be the best way to improve our new site's authority and inlinks? Would Google penalize us for doing that or would it effectively transfer the old sites authority to us?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pbhatt0