META Keywords - SEO Value

Often, the SEO value of META keywords is put into question. Luckily, the answer is simple. They’re not used. Every time I hear the term, I have flashbacks to the 1990s and the days of AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, and of course, Yahoo. Back then, all search engines parsed text. Relevancy wasn’t so much of an issue. But times have changed and so have the algorithms. Google pioneered a new type of engine based more on relevancy and less on page text.

META keywords contributed to a large amount of keyword spam. Website owners would inject these META tags with irrelevant, yet popular terms to increase web traffic. The outcome was poor search results for the user. Things needed to change. Google brought about a necessary step in the evolution of the search engine - a step that placed emphasis on back-links and their anchor text. This created more relevant search results and eliminated the potential for keyword spam. Hence, this is why META keywords aren’t used any more.