Meta Keywords Tag: Syntax and How Search Engines Treat It
Syntax of the meta keywords tag, what the HTML standard says about it, and why Google Search does not use it for indexing or ranking.
The meta keywords tag lists keywords for a page in the HTML <head>. Google Search does not use it, and the HTML standard says that many search engines ignore it. You do not have to add it to new pages.
Syntax
<meta name="keywords" content="british,type face,font,fonts,highway,highways">The HTML standard defines keywords as a standard metadata name. The value is a list of comma-separated tokens. Each token is a keyword relevant to the page. The example above comes from the standard. Put the tag inside the <head> element.
How Google treats the tag
Google lists the tag under unsupported tags on its meta tags page. Google says: “The meta-keyword tag is not used by Google Search, and it has no effect on indexing and ranking at all.” Matt Cutts of Google said the same in a Search Central blog post on September 21, 2009.
Because the tag has no effect in Google Search, it also does not harm a page there.
What the HTML standard says
The standard gives the reason that search engines ignore the tag: “Many search engines do not consider such keywords, because this feature has historically been used unreliably and even misleadingly as a way to spam search engine results in a way that is not helpful for users.”
The standard also tells software not to use the value when the value is not reliable. It gives one reasonable use: a content management system can use the keywords to fill the index of a search engine for its own site.
Yandex
Yandex lists the tag in its help on meta tags. It says that the tag “can influence the page’s relevance to search queries”. If Yandex traffic is important to you, you can keep the tag. Keep the keywords accurate for the page.
What the tag does not do
The meta keywords tag does not do these things:
- It does not change indexing or ranking in Google Search.
- It does not set the text that search results show. Google can use the meta description for the snippet.
- It does not control crawling or indexing. Use robots.txt or the robots meta tag for that.
- It does not hide your keywords. Anyone can read them in the page source.
Keep or remove the tag
If a site search tool or your content management system reads the tag, keep it. If nothing reads it, you can remove it the next time you edit the page template. For a list of the tags that search engines document, read the meta tags cheat sheet.