Never Mind That Last Post – Experiment Makes Yahoo! Look Foolish

Harry — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:18:59 +0000

Well, in my last post I wrote all about how a Yahoo! search representative publicly stated that Yahoo! does not recognize the keywords attribute of the meta tag. After Google had made a similar announcement just weeks before, it was looking like we could just about close the book on meta keywords.

But Search Engine Land says not so fast. Danny Sullivan published the results of a simple experiment this afternoon, and ended up making Yahoo! look foolish. His experiment was fantastically simple: he created a nonsense string of characters that returned no search results in Yahoo!. He then took that character string and put it in the meta keywords tag on the Search Engine Land homepage. A couple days later, the SEL homepage was appearing in the Yahoo! search results for his chosen character string. Conclusion: Yahoo! ranked that page based on the contents of the meta keywords tag.

Here’s the least you need to know:

Danny Sullivan proved that Yahoo! is ranking pages based on the meta keywords tag they claimed to ignore.
This story has an important moral: Take everything you hear from search engine representatives with a grain of salt. I’m not looking to demonize these folks, I simply want to remind readers that at the end of the day search engine reps want what’s best for their search engine, not necessarily your site.

Yahoo!: “We Don’t Value Meta Keywords Either”

Harry — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 21:19:34 +0000

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

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Never Mind That Last Post – Experiment Makes Yahoo! Look Foolish

Yahoo!: “We Don’t Value Meta Keywords Either”