The importance of the “keywords” meta tag for promotion today. Is it necessary to pay attention to the “keywords” meta tag today?
Today, the “keywords” meta tag is a waste of time. Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag at all in its ranking: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
Yandex supposedly can use this meta tag, as it says in the Help: «meta name=»Keywords» content=»…» — can be taken into account in determining the relevance of pages to search queries». But in practice, it is of no use.
Our recommendation is the following: do not waste your time filling in the “keywords” meta tag. It is better to pay more attention to those factors of the site that are actually taken into account in the ranking of search engines.
Dmitry Lutikov, a leading specialist in search engine optimization
On the Internet, there are many opinions on the subject. Consider the latest, most current information.
The official information from Yandex: «meta name=»Keywords» content=»…» — may be taken into account in determining the relevance of pages to search queries.
Here is «Not very official» information: about 4-5 years ago, optimizers greatly abused this meta tag, there was a lot of over spamming by its keywords. Yandex took this “keywords” into account very poorly.
It is easy to check whether the tag works or not by analyzing the sites at the top for a particular query. If in most cases, the tag is complete and consistent with the request, you can put it, it will not hurt. If most sites do not have the meta tag, you should not put it. In addition, this meta tag is not used in the snippets.
Our opinion is the following. We will not recommend anything, everyone decides for himself how to act. However, we do not use this tag in our company and successfully promote our site and sites of clients. The keywords meta tag has no effect on promotion.
Please note, over spamming this meta tag, as well as adding keywords that do not match the content of the page, can harm the position of the site or this page! It may even hurt if you specify a lot of keywords in it, or specify words that do not fully correspond to the page content. Most likely, this tag is working for some topics with very little competition in some regions of Russia. Under equal conditions, a site with a filled meta tag will be ranked perhaps slightly higher than the competition for low-frequency queries.
Evgeny Gluschenko, CEO of Intop-Media