Keyword Meta Tags don’t mean a thing, at all

If you heard a so-called SEOer telling you that you should use Keyword meta tags to gain higher rank in your niche, you can tell them to shut up. Because Google now confirms firmly that Google does not use keywords meta tag in its web search ranking, at all. No matter how many keywords you put on and no matter how good they are, they don’t mean a thing, at all.

Q: Does Google ever use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking?
A: In a word, NO.

Q: Why doesn’t Google use the keywords meta tag?
A: 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: Unlikely.

Nice, thanks Matt. You just cleared up another area that confuses people a lot.