Yahoo Ends Support of Meta Keyword Tag

by on 10/07/2009 in SEO

The Meta keyword tag was Yahoo’s primary factor for search. This is how Yahoo and other search engines knew what your website was about.

Yahoo has removed the use of the tag from its ranking algorithm. The news came during the Ask The Search Engines session at SMX East in New York today.

yahoo-ends-keyword-meta-tag

Yahoo was the only major search engine who actually supported the meta keyword tag. Cris Pierry, senior director of search at Yahoo explained that support actually had been ended unannounced “several” months ago.

Google and Bing do not support the meta keyword tag. In fact, Google has never supported it. The keywords meta tag has no impact whatsoever on how Google’s search engine ranks pages. None. Zilch. Nada according to search engine land. You can read the entire article here.

From the Google Blog - “Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword meta tags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.”

Say goodbye to meta! You will be missed.

10 Responses to “Yahoo Ends Support of Meta Keyword Tag”

  1. Klaus @ TechPatio

    Oct 7th, 2009

    I’m not sure that Google *never* supported meta keywords, are you sure that’s the case? I know that they recently announced “basically not at all”, when asked how much they use the meta keywords tag.

    Either way – it’s good that we now know that the 3 major search engines no longer support it, officially.

  2. BunnygotBlog

    Oct 8th, 2009

    Thanks for the heads up, Frank.

    It is important to know these things and I count on you for a lot of information.

    • Frank J

      Oct 8th, 2009

      Bunny,

      Thanks for the encouragement. I try to stay on top of all tech news, but it’s a big challenge. I am glad to catch what I can.

  3. Luke

    Oct 8th, 2009

    I think it’s a good thing meta keyword tags are now being disregarded – one less job for a web designer to do!
    I take it page title and meta descriptions are still of value though?

    • Frank J

      Oct 8th, 2009

      Luke,

      Title tags are very important. The description tag is losing its value, but many webmaster still feel it’s necessary. I am not one of those webmasters.

  4. Carla Fiscina

    Oct 8th, 2009

    However, this link speaks for itself:

    http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=a6l0j8f6jg9l30s12ew6nun9kr21qxe0

    • James Svoboda

      Oct 9th, 2009

      Great catch Carla! I’ll have to watch this search over the next few months and see if it drops out…