In a word, no. Google does sell a Google Search Appliance, and that product has the ability to match meta tags, which could include the keywords meta tag. But that’s an enterprise search appliance that is completely separate from our main web search. Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.
Why doesn’t Google use the keywords meta tag?
About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.
Does this mean that Google ignores all meta tags?
No, Google does support several other meta tags. This meta tags page documents more info on several meta tags that we do use.
Meta Tags & Your Header
Meta tags go within the header area of your web pages. A typical head might look like this:
<head>
<title>Welcome To Shoe Central!</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”All the best prices on shoes!” />
<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”shoe, shoes, shoee, shos, footwear” />
</head>
The header is the section that begins <head> and ends </head>. Between those elements, in our example, you have these tags:
Title: The text here becomes the title that is shown in search engine listings, in most cases.
Description: The text here is text that search engines sometimes use as a description for your web page when listing it (a meta tag lesson for another time).
Robots: This particular tag is configured to ensure that the page isn’t described using the a description that the Open Directory might have for it (Meta Robots Tag 101 explains this more).
Keywords: This tag is the topic of this article, so read on!
Indexing Versus Retrieval Versus Ranking
To understand, let me talk about three different things a search engine does when it crawls and lists your page:
Indexing: This is where the search engine effectively makes a copy of your page. The search engine is going to read and store the HTML content it finds — all of it. Evan was right when he said that the meta keyword tag is indexed by Google. Google knows that the tag exists and has recorded what’s in it. But that doesn’t mean it does anything else with it.
Retrieval: This is where the search engine finds all the matching documents relevant for what you searched for. Most of those documents will actually have the words you searched for on them, in the sections that the search engine searches against (there are some exceptions, such as when anchor text is used to find pages. Google Now Reporting Anchor Text Phrases, Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs and Google Declares Stephen Colbert As Greatest Living American explain more about this). While the search engine has recorded the entire page, it won’t search against everything indexed for retrieval. In other words, Google will look to see if words you searched for appear in the body area of a document, but it will NOT look in the meta keywords tag for matching words. The keywords tag, while indexed, is not used for retrieval at Google. At Yahoo, it is.
Ranking: This is where the search engine looks at all those documents retrieved for a search and puts them in order of most importance, according to its algorithm. Retrieval (or what information research professionals call “recall”) is about finding everything). Ranking (or what the IR folks call “precision” — see Tim Bray’s excellent On Search: Precision and Recall document) is about getting the best stuff up to the top. Yahoo, while using the tag for retrieval, really doesn’t assign much weight to it for ranking.
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