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

Creative Digressions » Google

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