Meta Keywords Tag 101

If you want the history of the meta keywords tag, how it emerged, how it declined, how to use it if you stupidly decide you still want to, see my detailed post from the past, Meta Keywords Tag 101: How To “Legally” Hide Words On Your Pages For Search Engines.

Surprise! Bing Says Meta Keywords Is A Signal

But really, don’t use it. You don’t need it. Google doesn’t support it. As for Bing, let me clear up the confusion here. In July, out on WebmasterWorld, Duane Forrester, senior product manager for Bing webmaster outreach, provided this advice about the tag:

I’ll make this statement: meta keywords is a signal. One of roughly a thousand we analyze.

Getting it right is a nice perk for us, but won’t rock your world. Abusing meta keywords can hurt you.

That was a big change, big news, since until that point, Microsoft hadn’t said that its search engine made any use of the meta keywords tag since the days of having run its own crawler. We’re talking back even before Bing, when the search engine was known as Microsoft Live Search.

I didn’t hear about this, and I gather it got by others, as well. A month later, WebmasterWorld featured it, which got Search Engine Roundtable to notice. I think I was on vacation that week, so I’m not feeling so bad! But Search Engine Roundtable featured it again this week, in a poll where nearly 50% said they now will use the tag.

All Those Damn Questions!

That I noticed. Painfully so. Because if Bing is using the meta keywords tag, that brings back all those questions I hate, like:

• What’s the right format?
• Do you need to have commas?
• Do you need to have a space after the comma?
• Is too much repetition going to help or hurt you?
• What is the maximum length?
• What if you go too long, will that hurt you?
• What if you think it was done wrong and you want to report that it’s all fixed?

A Spam Signal

I contacted Forrester to ask if it was true, and to see what further answers he could provide. After some back and forth, it seemed clear to me that Bing is looking at the tag as a spam signal, not a ranking signal. As I summarized to him in my email:

It sounds like you’re saying that you see a high correlation between crummy pages and people who use the meta keywords tag with garbage – that it’s a spam signal, not a ranking signal.

If that’s the case, then I’d still advise people that you don’t use it for ranking purposes (which solves all those really annoying questions above) but you might use it as a spam signal and that people simply shouldn’t use it.

And his response was:

Yeah, you’re pretty much bang on Danny. In fact, it’s not like we’re actively trying to encourage folks to start using the tag. And you’re right – the scenario I describe is more of a spam signal, which ultimately leads to rankings (or not, as the case may be).

So use the tag? Sure, if you want to take a chance that by overstuffing it, you’ll cause Bing to think you’re spamming. Be safe, be smart, save your time. Don’t use it.

What if you already have it on your page? Many pages do. And I wouldn’t panic, if you do. I suspect it’s seen as a spam signal more heavily if there are other spam signals present.

Postscript: After this posted, Forrester sent me this further comment about if you already use the tag:

The main thing people need to keep in mind if they decide to use the tag is to follow the known best practices. Ultimately, it’s the overt keyword stuffing that gets noticed and makes us want to look a little closer. If you’re willing to stuff pointless keywords into the meta keywords tag, what else might you be inclined to do?

There are two major scenarios that we will examine, including a look at the potential solutions and the choices that publishers can make.

No Place For Rel=Canonical

The “The Really Complicated Technical SEO Infrastructure Issues” panel at SMX Advanced started with controversy when REI’s Jonathan Colman said that REI.com benefitted from using rel=canonical on the product pages of its catalog.

For example, if there were 10 pages of tent products, pages 2 through 10 all implemented a canonical tag which pointed back to page 1.

This is when Google’s Maile Ohye, who was also on the panel, piped up and said that this was not a proper implementation of the canonical tag. So ideally, do not use this approach. Even though REI thinks it is working for them currently, and it might be, there is simply no assurance that it will work that way in the future.

Search engines implement their algorithms and update them from time to time based on the way they believe things are supposed to work, and any time you use a feature such as rel=canonical in a way other than intended, you face material risk of a problem at some point.

The rel=canonical tag should only be used when the target page (the one that the tag points to) has substantially all of the content on the source page (the one implementing the tag).

Scenarios where this works can occur when you have different sort orders for products, or pages that show subsets of the products on the target page.

The Scenario: Article Pagination

This scenario arises when a magazine has a very long article. One possible approach to this is simply to have a “more” button which populates the content on the existing URL if the user wants to see it (Salon Magazine uses this approach).

However, there are some publishers that choose to continue the content on one or more additional pages as you can see with this example from Discover Magazine:

In this particular example, the content for the article lives on these two different URLs:

• http://discovermagazine.com/2011/mar/09-vital-signs-those-who-know-us-best
• http://discovermagazine.com/2011/mar/09-vital-signs-those-who-know-us-best/article_view?b_start:int=1&-C=

This scenario could lead to potential SEO issues. There are two major ways to approach this situation:

1. Do Nothing

In other words, let the search engines find and index both pages. There is a strong argument for this, as the pages have different content and some searchers may only be interested in the content on the 2nd page of the article. To get the most of this strategy, consider some of the tips by Tedster on Webmaster World for optimizing paginated articles.

2. NoIndex the additional pages

You should consider this option if you believe that having visitors land on the 2nd page of the article (and other pages other than page 1) would be a bad user experience. Note that if third party publishers link to your 2nd article page, that it can still pass link juice back into the rest of your site, and that is a good thing.

The Scenario: E-Commerce Catalog Pagination

Anyone who has done shopping for popular products online has seen this scenario.

Here is an example from the Men’s Boots page on Zappos.com:

The major choices remain the same, but the arguments about them are a bit different:

1. Do Nothing

On the SEO Infrastructure panel, Maile Ohye argued that the search engines still see value on those pages because they list different products than the first page of products. The basic argument for leaving the pages alone is that they are not duplicate content and they may pick up their own search traffic.

2. NoIndex the additional pages

The counter argument to the do nothing scenario is that the unique text content on the pages is likely to be quite low. For that reason, it is not unreasonable to be concerned that the search engines will perceive these as low quality pages, and that they may therefore have a negative impact on search traffic.

Obviously, the latter would not be the goal of the search engines, but there are software algorithms involved, and these algorithms deal with a nearly limitless number of scenarios.

In spite of their best efforts, sometimes there are sites that get hurt for unintended reasons. Given that pages that simply list a bunch of products are not that likely to garner much direct search traffic it may make sense to avoid that risk.

No Place For NoFollow

If you do decide to NoIndex pages on your site, I do not advise that you NoFollow the links to those pages. NoFollow does not conserve any link juice when you implement it. It just does not pass the link juice to the page receiving the link, and that link juice is thrown away (it is not redistributed to other pages on your site).

Let the juice flow to your pages with NoIndex tags, because those pages can accumulate and pass PageRank, and they can then vote a portion of that PageRank back into the rest of your site.

Key Considerations Regarding Pagination

My inclination in the Article Pagination scenario is to simply do nothing, and let the search engines discover and index pages in the article beyond the first page.

There is little downside, and with a little page design effort, you can pretty much eliminate any concerns that users will have a poor experience landing on the 2nd page of an article.

Whether or not to place NoIndex tags on additional pages on e-commerce sites is a judgment call. Just be aware that the search engine’s preference is to discover and index that content. They want to be aware of it, and they want to handle it properly.

That said, it is not a webmaster guidelines violation to NoIndex the pages, nor is it an improper use of the NoIndex tag. In addition, there is some risk that the search engines will make an unintended mistake in understanding the value and uniqueness of the additional product pages. You need to decide which path makes you more comfortable.

This enables webmasters to set up a canonical for linking to or from PDF files or other non-HTML based files.

One of the examples given by Google is that a “webmaster can signal to Google that the canonical URL for the PDF download is the HTML document by using a rel=”canonical” HTTP header when the PDF file is requested.”

This also comes in handy when you use a CDN (content delivery network) and the content is being served from many different URLs. You can now use the rel=”canonical” within the HTTP header to set up those redirects for that type of content.

Related Stories:

• Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Unite On “Canonical Tag” To Reduce Duplicate Content Clutter
• Canonical Tag 2.0: Google To Add Cross Domain Support
• Google Supports Cross-Domain ‘Canonical Tag’

The test was simple. I placed a unique word in the meta keywords tag on the home page of Search Engine Land. This word — xcvteuflsowkldlslkslklsk — generated no results on Yahoo when I looked earlier this week. Today, when I searched, it brought back the Search Engine Land home page. Thus, Yahoo indeed indexes the content of that tag. (And to be clear, I looked before writing this article. In short order, this article itself, along with others, will appear because they’ll make use of that word).

During the session last week at SMX East, when Yahoo said it no longer supported this tag, several in the audience said they didn’t believe it. I was kind of struck. You’ve got a search representative flat-out saying they don’t do something, but no one wants to believe them? How things have changed. Sure, I can see distrust on some controversial issues (such as whether Google really does not count nofollowed links out of Wikipedia). But why would Yahoo lie about something like meta keywords support?

To be clear, I don’t think Yahoo was deliberately lying. The representative was probably confused in some way. Similarly over at Bing, despite them NOT supporting the tag (it’s not mentioned here) and never having done so since they launched their own search technology, they recently blogged much advice about using the tag.

As I commented about this:

That reads like someone got a copy of really old SEO advice and decided to put it out there regardless of what Bing actually does. I mean, my head hurts, but not everyone cared about commas or not. And no one had this 874 character limit. I mean, if you went over, it was no big deal. And the don’t repeat more than 4 times? According to what. Microsoft never, ever had its own guidelines like this.”

It’s a good reminder to the search reps. In many ways, you occupy god-like status on issues relating to SEO. Everything you write, everything you say will be fully believed by some. And if you’re not correct, you’ll confuse people and cause others to lose faith in you. If you don’t know, don’t say — or qualify: “I’m not sure” or “I’ll check on that.”

Postscript: Yahoo’s sent me this:

What changed with Yahoo’s ranking algorithms is that while we still index the meta keyword tag, the ranking importance given to meta keyword tags receives the lowest ranking signal in our system.

Words that appear in any other part of documents, including the body, title, description, anchor text etc., will take priority in ranking the document – the re-occurrence of these words in the meta keyword tag will not help in boosting the signal for these words.  Therefore, keyword stuffing in the keyword tag will not help a page’s recall or ranking, it will actually have less effect than introducing those same words in the body of the document, or any other section.

However, when no other ranking signal is present, unique words that only appear in the meta keyword tag section of documents can still be used to recall these documents.

The news came during the Ask The Search Engines session at SMX East in New York today. The search engines were all asked about their support of the tag. Moderator Danny Sullivan noted that only Yahoo provided support of the tag — prompting Cris Pierry, senior director of search at Yahoo, to announce that support actually had been ended unannounced “several” months ago.

Bing doesn’t support the tag. Google has never supported it and in fact clarified this again in a special post last month. See Google: Stop Suing Over The Meta Keywords Tag, We Don’t Use It for more about that.

NOTE: See our follow-up post, Sorry, Yahoo, You DO Index The Meta Keywords Tag.

The tag is incredibly powerful, as are 301 redirects and using this tag should be done with caution and slowly. Matt Cutts posted a new video explaining how one should go about using this tag, being that it is so new. Here is the video:

A tag, according to Wikipedia, is “a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (e.g. a picture, article, or video clip), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification of information.” More simply put (with due credit to Flickr.com): tags are like keyword or category labels, and they can help visitors find items which have something in common.

With tagging, items are cataloged and organized by keyword. Those keywords can then be displayed as navigation using what’s called a “tag cloud.” In a tag cloud, the font size of each keyword is proportionate to the number of times that keyword has been used as a tag. In other words, the more items a tag has been associated with, the larger the font size. Tag clouds were first popularized on Flickr, the photo sharing website. The social bookmarking site del.icio.us further popularized tag clouds (see example below). A tag cloud provides web visitors with a quick visual indication of what tags are most popular on a site. It’s a new, more intuitive way to navigate an extensive collection of content and find information. A tag cloud makes your website look very Web 2.0ish (if that’s a word?).

Clicking on a tag in a tag cloud leads the visitor to a “tag page.” A tag page contains a collection of the most recent items that have been tagged with the particular keyword (see example below). Tag clouds aren’t the only way to navigate to a tag page. Typically, an item’s tags will be displayed adjacent to the item, with each tag linking to its tag page. Also, once on a tag page, you can often find links to other tag pages through a list of “Related tags.” A tag is related to another tag if there are items that that have the tag in common.

Tagging isn’t just a tool for usability (even though it’s typically mostly thought of in those terms), it’s also a powerful weapon for search engine optimization. That’s because tagging allows you to rejig your internal hierarchical linking structure, flowing the link juice more strategically throughout your site. And because those links are textual and keyword-rich, a tag cloud is far superior in terms of SEO to the traditional graphical navigation bar.

When tagging is applied to a website, such as a blog, it can significantly increase the site’s traffic by achieving visibility for a much larger array of search terms. Consider, for example, the case of my own personal blog, StephanSpencer.com: simply by tagging one of my posts with the keyword “blog optimization,” I received a top 10 ranking in Google for the query “blog optimization” — within only a few weeks and without any additional effort. It was a tag page that achieved the high ranking for me, and it was created automatically the first time I used the tag. (Note: I use WordPress, which now, as of version 2.3, has tagging built in.) A tag page, by its very nature, is designed to have its tag as its keyword focus. So, simply select a relevant keyword to rank for when coming up with tags for your content, and presto! — instant rankings.

Tagging is particularly effective at delivering Long Tail search traffic when the site offers “tag conjunction pages.” Although the various obscure Long Tail search terms may be searched on by only a few people, in aggregate, they can really add up to a sizable amount of traffic. Tag conjunction pages are created automatically by the fact that there are multiple posts with two tags in common. On my blog, the links to tag conjunction pages are displayed in the right column of my tag pages underneath the section “Related Tags” (see my “blog optimization” tag page for an example). You will see that each “Related tag” is preceded with an “AND” and an “OR” link pointing to a tag conjunction page. By displaying links not just to the related tag pages but also to conjunctions between related tags, multitudes more pages are made available to the search engine spiders.

It should be noted that tagging is applicable not just to blogs, but all types of sites — ecommerce sites, content sites, even corporate sites. Probably the most well-known ecommerce site is Amazon.com, and it supports tagging. In fact it supports consumer-generated tagging.

Some sites allow tags to be defined by the community of visitors, not just the content author. Allowing your visitors to create the taxonomy of content items on your site by tagging your content (this is known as a “folksonomy”) may or may not be a good thing. It depends on how good of a job your visitors will do and how good your quality control systems are at stamping out spam and minimizing noise. Amazon.com’s tagging system has been plagued with useless tags like “betty’s birthday,” which really only has value for the tagger and no one else. Nonetheless, tagging seems to be working for Amazon; if it wasn’t, they would cease expanding upon their tagging functionality and probably discontinue offering it altogether. Another issue with letting visitors do the tagging is lack of consistency. Sometimes visitors will misspell words, sometimes they will add hyphenation, sometimes they will use obscure synonyms. Which brings me to another point: your visitors don’t know how to (and don’t care to) conduct keyword research — identifying popularity of various keywords by search engine users. They may, for instance, tag a product with “hard disk” when “hard drive” is the much more popular keyword with searchers. But what do you expect? After all, you’re getting free labor!

One corporate site where tagging has been utilized, to great effect, is my company’s website, — Netconcepts.com. Tagging was largely responsible for a more than doubling of pageviews — within two months. First, every testimonial, every portfolio entry, every press mention, as well as each bio, article, and case study, was broken out into a separate blog post. Then, each post was tagged with appropriate keywords. For example, all the testimonials were tagged with the word “Testimonials.” So instead of having a single testimonials page as we used to, we have a testimonials tag page that spans three web pages (at 10 posts per page) and each of the 30 testimonials is a separate web page now too. In other words, we went from 1 page to 33 pages; that’s a lot more search engine fodder, all with different keyword foci!

Spiders can find and index these tag pages through the text links contained within the tag cloud on the home page, through text links underneath each post, and through links to “Related Tags” on each tag page. Remember, Related Tags are determined from posts that have the tag (from the tag page in question) in common. So, for example, because we have posts that are tagged with both “Web Marketing” and “Testimonials,” “Web Marketing” then appears as a related tag on the Testimonials tag page and “Testimonials” appears as a related tag on the Web Marketing tag page. Let’s restate that a little bit differently just to clarify… All our web marketing related items (testimonials, case studies, etc.) were tagged with “Web Marketing.” Consequently, there is a tag page that relates to “Web Marketing” and a tag page that relates to “Testimonials.” Additionally, there’s a tag page that relates to “Web marketing testimonials” — the intersection of those two tags. That makes for a plethora of tag pages, considering how many different permutations there are for various combinations of tags being “ANDed” or “ORed” together. The result? Thousands of tag pages and tag conjunction pages indexed by Google, many of which are bringing in traffic, albeit individually in small amounts. For example, a tag conjunction page ranks well in Google for “web marketing testimonials,” though few search for that term. In all, the traffic increase from this initiative was substantial, as illustrated in the traffic graphs in the case study at www.netconcepts.com/netconcepts-case-study/.

Over time, look for tagging to become much more widespread across the Web. Until then, tagging presents a distinct competitive advantage, both in terms of search engine visibility and user experience.

Stephan Spencer is founder and president of Netconcepts, a 12-year-old web agency specializing in search engine optimized ecommerce. He writes for several publications and blogs at the Natural Search Blog. The 100% Organic column appears Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

The meta keywords tag is one of several of meta tags that you can insert into your web pages to provide search engines with information about your pages that isn’t visible on the page itself. For example, my Meta Robots Tag 101: Blocking Spiders, Cached Pages & More article covers how you can use a different meta tag — the meta robots tag — to block pages from being indexed. Users don’t see this information (unless they look at your source code), but search engines do.

Meta Tags & Your Header

Meta tags go within the header area of your web pages. A typical head might look like this:

<head> <title>Welcome To Shoe Central!</title> <meta name=”description” content=”All the best prices on shoes!” /> <meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” /> <meta name=”keywords” content=”shoe, shoes, shoee, shos, footwear” /> </head>

The header is the section that begins <head> and ends </head>. Between those elements, in our example, you have these tags:

• Title: The text here becomes the title that is shown in search engine listings, in most cases.
• Description: The text here is text that search engines sometimes use as a description for your web page when listing it (a meta tag lesson for another time).
• Robots: This particular tag is configured to ensure that the page isn’t described using the a description that the Open Directory might have for it (Meta Robots Tag 101 explains this more).
• Keywords: This tag is the topic of this article, so read on!

History Of Meta Keywords

I’ve long written about search engines and meta tags, but I have never been able to pin down exactly who created the meta keywords tag. There’s a December 1995 internet draft memo that’s the earliest and most authoritative mention of the tag I know of. It says:

<META HTTP-EQUIV= “Keywords” CONTENT= “Italy Product, Italy Tourism”>

The spaces between a comma and a word or vice versa are ignored….

These ‘keywords’ were specifically conceived for exhaustively and completely catalogue the HTML document. This allows the software agents to index at best your own document. To do a preliminary indexing, it’s important to use at least the http-equiv meta-tag “keywords”.

Sounds good, right? Like this is designed for the search engines to use? The issue is that HTML specs like these (especially drafts) are not necessarily used by the search engines. They can use them, ignore them or build upon them as they see fit.

As it turns out, several of the major search engines got together in May 1996 to talk about meta data. That meeting gave birth to a common standard for the meta robots and the meta description tags. As for the meta keywords tag, it was discussed, but no specification emerged.

Despite no specification, both Infoseek (later Go.com, these days no longer crawling the web) and AltaVista (now owned and powered by Yahoo) offered support for the meta keywords tag in 1996. If you looked at their help files at the time, they encouraged site owners to use the tag. Inktomi (now owned by Yahoo) also provided support when it began operations later in 1996, and Lycos (no longer crawling the web) added support in 1997.

That year — 1997 — was the last year that the meta keywords tag enjoyed support among the majority of major crawlers out there (4 out of 7 – Excite, WebCrawler and Northern Light, also crawling the web that year, did not support it).

Support Dies Off

When new search engines emerged in 1998, such as Google and FAST, they didn’t support the tag. The reason was simple. By that time, search engines had learned that some webmasters would “stuff” the same word over and over into the meta keywords tag, as a way of trying to rank better. At the time, search engines didn’t rely so heavily on link analysis, so page stuffing like this was more effective. Alternatively, some site owners would insert words that they weren’t relevant for.

In July 2002, AltaVista dropped its support of the tag. That left Inktomi as the only major crawler still supporting it, causing me to somewhat famously in the SEO world to declare the tag dead, since it was no longer a major ranking factor for even Inktomi:

Traffick.com’s Andrew Goodman wrote recently in an essay about meta tags, “If somebody would just declare the end of the metatag era, full stop, it would make it easier on everyone.”

I’m happy to oblige, at least in the case of the meta keywords tag. Now supported by only one major crawler-based search engine — Inktomi — the value of adding meta keywords tags to pages seems little worth the time. In my opinion, the meta keywords tag is dead, dead, dead. And like Andrew, good riddance, I say!

Since that time, Inktomi was rolled up into Yahoo, which continues to support the meta keywords tag as part of its Yahoo search engine. Or does it?

Search Engine Rep Confusion

Last month, I moderated a panel of search reps when that perennial favorite question came up during the session. Who supports the meta keywords tag?

Sigh. But if this question still coming up wasn’t depressing enough, then the search engine reps starting responding with a load of confusion. To paraphrase:

No, we don’t support it. Well, we read it. We read it, but it doesn’t matter. Actually, maybe we don’t read it.

Even Evan Roseman from Google said at one point that Google reads the meta keywords tag, suggesting no doubt to some that Google uses the tag.

To be clear, Google doesn’t. I’ll prove it further below, but it doesn’t, OK?

I gave Evan (hopefully) some good humored hassle afterward for saying this. He’s at least the second Google rep to declare this on panels I’ve moderated in as many years, and the problem is that the engineers (from any of the search engines) often take the question too literally.

Indexing Versus Retrieval Versus Ranking

To understand, let me talk about three different things a search engine does when it crawls and lists your page:

• Indexing: This is where the search engine effectively makes a copy of your page. The search engine is going to read and store the HTML content it finds — all of it. Evan was right when he said that the meta keyword tag is indexed by Google. Google knows that the tag exists and has recorded what’s in it. But that doesn’t mean it does anything else with it.
• Retrieval: This is where the search engine finds all the matching documents relevant for what you searched for. Most of those documents will actually have the words you searched for on them, in the sections that the search engine searches against (there are some exceptions, such as when anchor text is used to find pages. Google Now Reporting Anchor Text Phrases, Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs and Google Declares Stephen Colbert As Greatest Living American explain more about this). While the search engine has recorded the entire page, it won’t search against everything indexed for retrieval. In other words, Google will look to see if words you searched for appear in the body area of a document, but it will NOT look in the meta keywords tag for matching words. The keywords tag, while indexed, is not used for retrieval at Google. At Yahoo, it is.
• Ranking: This is where the search engine looks at all those documents retrieved for a search and puts them in order of most importance, according to its algorithm. Retrieval (or what information research professionals call “recall”) is about finding everything). Ranking (or what the IR folks call “precision” — see Tim Bray’s excellent On Search: Precision and Recall document) is about getting the best stuff up to the top. Yahoo, while using the tag for retrieval, really doesn’t assign much weight to it for ranking.

Testing For Retrieval

Back to my panel experience. Since the reps were unclear, I declared to the audience that I’d just go out and test it again myself. It’s literally been about five years since I’ve last tested the tag, because I (and many others) feel it is so useless. There are better things to do with our time. But since that question needs a big old stake to the heart, I rolled up my sleeves and got cracking.

On the Search Engine Land home page, I inserted this meta keywords tag:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”qiskodslajdmnkd, ddakaieciuaj jkdalladpaoaw, wdaopeqndlkakljad” />

I had searched for all of these words on the four major search engines of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask and found no pages that matched. If these search engines made use of the meta keywords tag, I’d know in short order, if my page started coming up.

The tag went up on August 28. I then needed to wait until I could see each search engine had the most current version of my page (Squeezing The Search Loaf: Finding Search Engine Freshness & Crawl Dates explains more on how to do this).

Google: No

It took two days, until August 30, for Google to show the latest version of my page in its index. I searched for each of the words, and my home page didn’t come up. The meta keyword tag was not used for retrieval and thus not supported.

Microsoft Live: No

It took five days, until September 2, for Microsoft to show a version of my page with the meta keywords tag on it. As an aside, Microsoft is kind of annoying. It will say something like this in the cached copy of the page:

This is a version of http://searchengineland.com/ as it looked when our crawler examined the site on 9/2/2007. The page you see below is the version in our index that was used to rank this page in the results to your recent query. This is not necessarily the most recent version of the page – to see the most recent version of this page, visit the page on the web.

If you glance quickly at the date, you might think the page has been revisited fairly recently. But as the text explains, it might be older. Indeed, when I looked on September 2 (as is the case today), the copy of the page in the index was as of August 30, as I could tell from the stories shown.

As with Google, I searched for each of the words, and my page didn’t come up. The meta keyword tag was NOT used for retrieval and thus not supported.

Yahoo: Yes

It took two days, until August 30, for Yahoo to have my latest page. Searches there did bring up the home page for all words. So the meta keywords tag IS used for retrieval.

Ask: Yes

Ask took the longest to show the most current version of my page, not reflecting the changes until today. Actually, when I look at the cached copy even now, it says that the page is from August 13 and uses a redirection URL rather than my http://searchengineland.com address.

Still, I can tell Ask has a version with the meta keywords tag on it since I’m getting back my home page when searching for words in that tag. As with Yahoo, the meta keywords tag IS used for retrieval.

Should You Use It? Sure, For Misspellings

So there you have it — half of the major crawlers (Yahoo & Ask.com) DO support the tag. Should you begin using it? My advice would be only for misspellings and really unusual words.

As explained, the tag can help with retrieval. A word in the tag is treated as if it were a word visible on the page itself. Now that’s handy for misspellings. For example, say you’re writing about Basset hounds. You suspect some people might misspell the name as Bassett hounds, adding an extra T. You could misspell the word yourself on the visible page, but that makes you look bad. You could insert the word and then try to hide it using CSS styles or putting it in the same color as the page background. But this type of “hidden” text is generally against search engine guidelines.

Enter the meta keywords tag. Just do this:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”bassett” />

Now you’ve got the misspelling on your page in a “legal” means that will be read by Yahoo and Ask. You’re still out of luck for Google and Live.com, but two out four ain’t bad.

But I Want To Rank!

What about ranking better with the tag. I mentioned already that many experienced SEOs don’t find it useful. Believe me, if just putting a single word into that tag was going to rank your page better, everyone would be doing it. Instead, search for anything on Yahoo or Ask. You’ll see plenty of pages ranking well for words without those words appearing in the meta keywords tag. And if you do see the words in the tag, it’s more due to coincidence — the words also appear in the body copy, in the title tag and often in links pointing at the page. The words in the meta keywords tag aren’t the primary reason the page is ranking well. Promise.

Back to our Basset Hound example. Sure, you can add the correct spelling to your meta keywords tag. Go ahead, if you want. Just understand that it is not likely to make you rank any better than if you didn’t include it at all. Moreover, beginners are especially likely to spend far too long worrying about getting the “right” words in the meta keywords tag rather than just writing good body copy.

Comma Conundrum

One of the most common questions I used to get way back in the old days was over using commas in the meta keywords tag. Consider these options:

1. <meta name=”keywords” content=”bassett, hound, hounds, basset” />
2. <meta name=”keywords” content=”bassett,hound,hounds,basset” />
3. <meta name=”keywords” content=”bassett hound, bassett hounds, basset hound, basset hound” />
4. <meta name=”keywords” content=”bassett hound,bassett hounds,basset hound,basset hound” />
5. <meta name=”keywords” content=”bassett hound bassett hounds basset hound basset hound” />
6. <meta name=”keywords” content=”bassett hound basset hounds” />

Sigh. See why I hate this tag so much, when I’ve had to deal with people wondering about commas and spaces and variations like this. Let’s take it from the top, as to the motivations behind these versions:

1. This is someone who thinks that each word should be on its own, separated by a comma and with a space in front of the next word.
2. This is someone who thinks that getting rid of the spaces means they can squeeze in more words.
3. This is someone who thinks that if there are particular phrases they want to be found for, those phrases should be together and set off by commas.
4. As with three, but losing the spaces to squeeze in more words.
5. Similar to three but thinking you don’t need commas at all.
6. This is Mr. or Ms. Paranoid. They’re concerned about saying any word too often. So they lose the commas, restrict repetition and hope that proximity will help (IE, put “basset” behind “hound” rather than in front and maybe you’ll still show up for “basset hound.”

Which way should you go? I’d suggest number three, for these reasons:

• Yahoo has long recommended using commas and in particular supported them as a way to separate out distinct terms for those in their paid inclusion programs. I’ll update this page with the latest advice, but commas still seem to make sense.
• Spaces just make things look nicer, and you shouldn’t be shoving a ton of terms in the tag anyway. How long is too long? No idea! In the past, the search engines just wouldn’t index content beyond around 250 to 1,000 characters. Maybe I’ll test this in the future.
• You do want phrases kept together. “bassett, hound” is probably going to be seen as “bassett hound” anyway, but why risk it?

Other Uses

I mentioned that misspellings were a key use for the tag. You could also use it for synonyms. For example, if you have a page all about shoes and you never say “footwear,” you could put that word in your tag. However, it’s far better if you just find a way to make use of the word in the body copy itself. That text is retrieved by all the major search engines, not just some.

Aside from synonyms, perhaps you have a page that’s all Flash or all images. Use the meta keywords tag to describe the page. Just remember that you’re still not likely to rank better than other pages that have textual information. Search engines are textual creatures. Give them what they want.

Some Official Guidelines

The W3C has guidelines (and here) in HTML 4.0 about meta data and search engines, while the XHTML specs don’t get into it at all. Ignore the specs. YES, IGNORE THE SPECS. Some of them are wrong; some are outdated. The only thing I can see that they explain is the difference between these:

• <meta name=”keywords” content=”bassett”>
• <meta name=”keywords” content=”bassett” />

See how the second tag ends /> rather than > in the first? As best I can tell, this is because a meta tag is an “empty element” in XHTML, where there’s not a “start” and a “finish” (as with a paragraph element: <p> is the beginning, with </p> the end). Empty elements in XHTML need that /> format.

I haven’t tested things without the />, but there are so many (so very, very many) pages out there not following that syntax that it is virtually certain Yahoo and Ask will read the tag either way. Doing it fresh? Do it /> style. But don’t go back and start changing things.

Aside from that, if you want to know how a search engine deals with meta data officially, you go to the search engine itself. Ask’s webmaster guidelines don’t mention the meta keywords tag, so that leaves Yahoo:

• Yahoo Quality Guidelines: “Metadata (including title and description) that accurately describes the contents of a web page.” This is telling you don’t lie with your keywords. Don’t insert words that aren’t somehow related to the topic of your page.
• How do I improve the ranking of my web site in the search results?: “Use a ‘keyword’ meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page.” Note that it doesn’t say you’ll automatically rank better by doing this. Also, unique words for each page would be my advice, as well — but do NOT worry if you decide to use the same set of key terms on each of your pages. It isn’t that big of a deal.

Looking for the exact format that you should use for the meta keywords tag from Yahoo? You know, commas, spaces and all that. Sorry — they don’t provide it, which is another sign you’re probably worrying too much about it.

Freaked? Skip It

Overall, here’s the best advice I can offer anyone dealing with this tag. If you begin to feel confused, concern, tired or uncertain when pondering it, SKIP THE TAG ENTIRELY. It’s not going to hurt you to not have it, and it’s not worth the time fretting about it.