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.
Welcome to Creative Digressions! My name is Harry Lund and I am social media maven hailing from New Hampshire. My goal for Creative Digressions is for it to become a useful, informative, and/or thought provoking blog on all topics relating to social media, online marketing, and the Internet in general.
