Earlier this week, Yahoo!’s Senior Director of Search Cris Pierry announced at SMX East, a search marketing conference in New York, that Yahoo! does not value the keywords attribute of the meta tag in its search algorithm. Not even a little bit. This announcement comes just two weeks after Google made a similar announcement in their blog.

Spokespeople for both engines have long hinted that meta keywords do not play a large role in formulating their search results. This was a gradual response to the widespread issue of spam in the keywords attribute, and the ability of many to utilize meta keywords to gain undeserved or just plain incorrect rankings.

I wrote a more detailed analysis of this issue in the CommonPlaces blog, but here’s the least you need to know:

• Yahoo doesn’t recognize the meta keywords tag. They won’t penalize you for having one—they’ll simply ignore it. Ditto for Google.
• Bing, on the other hand, does recognize the tag. However, they admit that they place a low value on it.
• Final recommendation: If you already have meta keywords in place, leave them. If you’re building a new site, include meta keywords if it can be done with little effort. Don’t go out of your way to include a tag that will either be ignored or minimally valued