Does Google Use The Meta Keywords Tag For Rankings? No

It has been a while since I covered the keyword meta tag and for some reason the topic has come up recently, so I decided to cover it again. In short, Google Search still does not use the keyword meta tag for ranking purposes.

Google does not look at the words in your keyword meta tag for search purposes. Adding, removing, spamming or excluding words or the meta tag completely will not matter for your rankings in Google Search.

Google said this back in 2009 and said it again last year in this video. Google also has it posted in its official documentation where it said, “The meta-keyword tag is not used by Google Search, and it has no effect on indexing and ranking at all.”

Google Search does not look at the words in your keyword meta tag at all.

Most recently, John Mueller from Google said in this video, “Just to be clear from the start, the answer is still no. We do not use the contents of the keyword meta tag in Google Search.” “And again, Google Search does not use the keywords meta tag,” he added.

Here is that video:

Then in 2012, Matt Cutts posted another video on the topic and said, “You shouldn’t spend any time on the meta keywords tag. We don’t use it.” He added, “And so a lot of webmasters just keyword stuff there. And so it’s really not all that helpful. So we don’t use meta keywords at all.”

Here is that video:

Then before that in 2009, Matt Cutts posted this video where he said “So we had an interesting question from someone who just asked me, “How much do you use the keyword or keywords meta tag in your main search results?” And the answer is, basically not at all.”

Here is that video:

Now Bing Search may use keywords meta tag still. You may have other uses for meta keywords, such as for internal search, for other content purposes. But for ranking purposes in Google Search, Google does not use it.

Here is a recent poll I posted asking SEOs if they use the keyword meta tag:

Do you still use meta keywords tags on pages you optimize?
rerunning a poll @bill_slawski ran a few years ago

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) August 30, 2023

This was the poll from Bill, RIP, from a few years ago:

Do you still use meta keywords tags on pages you optimize?

— Bill Slawski ⚓ 🇺🇦 (@bill_slawski) May 29, 2020

Forum discussion at Twitter.