Keywords Meta Tag Doesn't Matter To Google


September 23, 2009

The Google Webmaster Tool blog announced officially Monday that Google doesn't use the keywords meta tag in their ranking algorithm.  But what really caught my attention was a little episode on Matt Cutts' blog, where he reiterated the Google doesn't use the keywords meta tag as a ranking factor and Graywolf actually called him out on in the comments.  In case you missed it, it goes like this:

graywolf September 21, 2009 at 12:42 pm

"so what about this about meta descrptions
http://bit.ly/TW8cC
you mention descriptions in the google blog post, no longer playing a role and I’m trying clarify that, with your previous statement which doesnt agree"


Matt Cutts September 21, 2009 at 1:29 pm

"...graywolf, meta descriptions don’t count in scoring (that is, determining the scores which are then used to determine what order to show the results in). So changing your meta description tag won’t make your website rank higher. When we show snippets, we can sometimes use the meta description as the snippet that we show. To your point, if two results have the same snippet (not just because of the meta description but in general), we will often show the first result and then the other results are shown if you add “&filter=0″. But the post was about the keywords meta tag and clarifying that we don’t use the keywords meta tag. The reason we mentioned the description meta tag was to make the point that we don’t disregard all meta tags."


graywolf September 21, 2009 at 1:36 pm

"@mattcutts so like in the threadwatch example linked to above, you now say that having and identical meta description across your entire site will not have a negative impact on your site, and conversely having different descriptions for each page on your site will not have a positive affect.

I’m perfectly ok with things like that changing in the 2-ish years since then just want to clarify that"


I am still waiting for Matt Cutts to respond to Graywolf... if he decides to. Hope the readers enjoyed that as much as I did.


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