Mittens, the youngest Web Piecat, encountered an SEO living in 1995. A heated discussion ensued. Mittens was rubbing used stocks on his face at the time, naturally. But the ancient SEO’s insistence on the value of meta keywords to organic search rankings made Mitty do the classic face palm, with socks. Dirty socks. Yeah, he likes them. Lots.
Go ahead and tell them, Mittens:
“Meta keywords have no positive impact on organic search rankings. The last engine to give up the meta keywords ghost was Yahoo! (And yes the ‘bang’ was for branding, not excitement.) So unless you’re stuffing them full of crap, such as Nike Nike Viagra, they can actually hurt you. So you may even be best off not having the tag at all. Now, if your internal search engine uses meta keywords, you’ll want to keep them around for that purpose. Now go fetch me another mylar ball, human.”
UPDATE: Apparently Mittens and I stand partially corrected: As of last week Bing’s Senior Product Manager, Duane Forrester, admitted meta keywords are one of about a thousand of signals they use.
I’ll make this statement: meta keywords is a signal. One of roughly a thousand we analyze. Getting it right is a nice perk for us, but won’t rock your world. Abusing meta keywords can hurt you.
Am I going to recommend optimizing them just for Binghoo? Especially if it won’t “rock my world”? Not unless it’s easy (as in you have a small site) or it’s scalable to create unique relevant meta keywords in your CMS.
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They do not have a negative impact also. Used in the right way some engines will use them and overall they can add to the relevancy of a page.
Now quote me something from Matt Cutts!
Actually, according to Bing, if abused they can have a negative impact. “Abusing meta keywords can hurt you.” And yes, as of last week Bing does admit meta keywords are one of thousands of signals. Am I going to recommend optimizing them just for Binghoo? Not unless it’s easy (as in you have a small site) or a CMS that makes it scalable to create unique and relevant meta keywords for every page. Otherwise, nope.
And here’s your quote from Matt Cutts, though I’m sure I detected sarcasm in your request:
“Google does not use the keywords meta tag in our web search.” It comes complete with a webmaster video. Enjoy.