Does the keyword meta tag not matter anymore?
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In the SeoMoz report generated, it recommended removing the meta keywords tag as it was no long relevant?
why is google no longer considering this?
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I agree with your point; however, scanning a competitors keywords tag is, as you said, just a starting point (assuming they didn't dump their entire link building campaign worth of keywords/phrases into the tag).
For example, a keywords tag for a real estate site homepage might be: content="real estate, homes for sale, houses for sale", or something along those lines. Now, those keywords might be useful for the search engines that still respect the keywords tag, but they're not any help to competition as you probably could have guess, just by looking at the site, that those were keywords they are probably trying to optimize for, anyways.
Just remember, Google's not the only search engine out there.
It'd be foolish to give away any trade secrets within those tags, anyways, so there's not much to worry about in my opinion.
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At the start of an SEO campaign for my smaller client I use their competitors site keyword metat tag as a starting point for keyword research.
I also recommend that we remove the keyword meta from my clients sites so other SEOs don't use the information to their own benefit.
It's an approach that seems to work for me.
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However, it's believed that there are still smaller search engines out there that do. It doesn't hurt IMO, so why not include it?
Just don't bloat it with a million keywords. Keep it short and sweet to what the page content is about; just like adding tags in Wordpress.
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Google have not used they keyword meta tag since about 2009 IIRC
See here for more details: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
How that helps,
K
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