It’s official! In the SEO world, we’ve assumed it for a long time, but yesterday, Google officially announced that they don’t pay attention to your META Keywords when ranking pages in search results.
In fact, the post from Google’s Official Webmaster Central Blog indicates that Google doesn’t pay any attention to the keywords that you’ve so carefully chosen to include in that list. Even though we’ve suspected for a while that META Keywords weren’t a boon for SEO, this still changes things up a bit.
The conventional wisdom in SEO used to be that it probably doesn’t help you much to have META Keywords, but it can’t hurt. I think we can all agree that this is no longer the case. Even though this META tag won’t hurt your search results, it can be a painstaking & lengthy process to curate this list and add the most relevant words & phrases to each page. That’s valuable time that could better be spent on another, more valuable SEO initiative – or even just getting offline and calling another prospect!