Meta Keywords Good or Bad
-
Hi All,
I've been reading more about the meta keyword tag and why it may not be a good idea to include them on pages and am looking for thoughts/feedback on this idea. If you have employed this tactic, can you give me some insight into any results you saw. If you decided to not employ this tactic, why did you choose not to? I wan to understand all sides of this before employing any changes to my company's websites.
Thank you for your help!
-
What about using it just a a simple place to keep your targeted keyword for a given page while you are working? So if you have a number of hand coded page and want to quickly go through and put in what you are going for there before you start changing the page to suit. I'm not sure why you would care if competitors knew? If your page is optimized your keyword phrase for that page is in the title and the h1 so they can crawl your site if they want and get all of them anyway.
-
We havent used Meta keywords for a couple of years but I read an interesting article yesterday that suggested using this field to list semantic keywords and synonyms that you couldnt fit naturally into the body content. Havent tried it yet, just thought it was an interesting concept.
-
The only time I've ever used keywords recently was when a competitor kindly laid out all of the keywords they're targeting in their meta keywords tag!
As the others have said, meta keywords just isn't worth the worry, it's not going to affect how search engines interpret your page* and you're better off spending the time on setting up authorship, open-graph etc.
(*Bing have even said that in some cases they may use the keywords meta tag as an indicator of a spammy site.)
-
There are 100s of areas that search engines look in to before ranking any website against any key phrase. Meta keyword tag is one of the areas which are considered as less important.
Google have clearly recommended not to use it and they do not use this as a ranking factor but as far as the Bing is concern they do use it as a ranking signal but still this does not land in important ranking factors.
There are no significant reasons why I do not use it because there are tools which can indicate competitors that what keywords i am focusing, so saying that I am not using so that my competitors didn’t get to know what I am up to is silly!
I think Meta keyword tag is like good for nothing... Use it or don’t use it... it does not matter much i think you should invest your time looking in to other important areas and i believe that will be the better use of the time!
-
I wouldn't spend my time deleting them as its a waste of time since Google ignores them.
If I'm working on SEO or other page elements and want to do some housecleaning I get rid of them.
On all current SEO practices, meta keywords are completely off the to-do list.
-
Well, I've removed the keyword tag from all my Websites about 2 years ago. Mainly because Google said they don't use it anymore. However, Bing said that they could still use the meta to figure out what is the page about. Still we haven't see change in terms of rankings.
I personally won't use that meta again, just to remove some clutter from the page. With all today's metas (authorship, OGs, twitter cards, etc.) you are just adding more "garbage" that actually doesn't do anything.
-
They are not used by search engines anymore and is really just a good way for your competitors to see what keywords you might be targeting. I would not use them.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
If concepts are too similar when grouping keywords what do I do ?
I will summarise and then ty to explain : When I group keyword with the keyword explorer if concepts (grouping keywords) that I find are too similar to each other how do I go about it... Ldg me know explain. When google doesn't have enough data to rank a website with content does it only use links ? Let me give you an example. If I take "title tag" as a keyword people have a lots of questions that can be answered which will create numerous concepts. However, let's take "hiking tours Italy" for example. If I go through the keyword explorer or all the other tools existing out there people don't have questions. All I find are variations or synonyms of my keyword and I group by low lexical similarity all the words are going to be very similar. I know that each variation can be grouped and considered a different concepts but writing about various concepts that mean exactly the same thing because of lack of data not very smart and useful... So in that case what does google do, does it rank a website only based on links or schema ? see that it has no way to rank it based on good quality content because of a lack of data (questions that could be answers that would lead to concepts). Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Hidden category content really bad?
Hi Guys, I'm working with a site which has hidden based category content see: http://i.imgur.com/Sgko2we.jpg It seems google are still indexing these pages but i heard Google might ignore or reduce the benefit of hidden content like this.I just want to confirm if this is the case? And if this is a really bad thing for SEO?Cheers.Sgko2we.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seowork2140 -
Bad SEO Practice: in title tag?
Greetings, I just discovered that some of our content was produced with
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_Lifescript
tags in the title tag. Example: <title>Diabetes Symptoms <br> In Women Over 40</title> My gut says this is bad for SEO, but I couldn't find a definitive answer on the web, so I thought I would ask the community of gurus here at Moz. 🙂 Thanks in advance for any reply. Kind regards, Eric0 -
Google News and Meta Title
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPalmer
1. I just read this article: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-news-titles-h1-19876.html
Google want the same title. no problem. but what about the brand? for example
POST TITLE BLA BLU | My Brand
The "post title bla blu" is the H1 and title of the article and | My Brand is my brand...
I can keep it as is with the My brand? or remove it? what about posts with long title for example "POST TITLE BLA BLU POST TITLE BLA BLU | My Brand"
What is you suggestion, I know Google doesn't show all the text and we'll see "...". it's still important to write the brand name in the title or just the post title? (without the brand). Thanks,0 -
Meta-description not used at all times
Hi all We are marketing an e-commerce site and seem to have a weird issue. For some reason the clearly specified meta description is not being used in the SERPs. Had a look in the source but all tags seems to be there. The site can be found here:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Resultify
www.bangerhead.se A sample search in Google that uses the wrong info in the SERP:
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C5CHFA_enSE548SE548&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#safe=off&q=bangerhead Any ideas to why this is? Grateful for any inputHave a nice day Fredrik0 -
Is it bad practice to create pages that 404?
We have member pages on our site that are initially empty, until the member does some activity. Currently, since all of these pages are soft 404s, we return a 404 for all these pages and all internal links to them are js links (not links as far as bots are concerned). As soon as the page has content, we switch it to 200 and make the links into regular hrefs. After doing some research, I started thinking that this is not the best way to handle this situation. A better idea would be to noindex/follow the pages (before they have content) and let the links to these pages be real links. I'd love to hear input and feedback from fellow Mozzers. What are your thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Recommendations for other good SEO forums?
I learn so much from reading the Moz forum everyday. I would like to expand my learning and start following some other SEO forums as well. What are your recommendations for additional SEO forums?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
SEO Moz Keyword Ranking Tool
The SEO Moz keyword ranking tool is useful and fairly accurate but it would be more useful to know why the ranking changed. Can the tool provide any insight in this regard?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340