Google have officially announced that the Meta Keywords tag is not used in its web search rankings. It also says that the Meta Description is not used as a ranking factor, which I somewhat disagree with, but will come to more on that later.
Meta Keywords Tag
This comes as no surprise to anyone working in the SEO Industry that the Meta Keywords tag is not used by Google, as its been pretty common knowledge for a number of years that popping hundreds of words in your Meta Keywords tags was never going to get you ranking for any of those phrases. This tag has absolutely no effect on your Google search engine rankings.
The reason for this, really is that Google’s algorithm is now advanced enough to be able to able to judge from the content on your page what that page is about, and this tag also has had a history of being abused. The main ranking factors for Google are mostly with off page signals, i.e. the links to your website, and the words used in those links.
Does this mean that it is entirely pointless specifying a Meta Keywords tag? For your Google rankings, this is probably the case, but I think that it is important to remember that there are other search engines to SEO for other than Google. It is often commented that Yahoo! and Ask both look at this tag as part of their assessments of websites and this may play a very small part in helping you to achieve a ranking in either of those engines, or of many other smaller, less well used engines.
Really it is a matter of choice – I suspect that in many cases, I will continue to make use of this tag on clients websites as a catch all for some of these smaller engines, as there isn’t a lot work involved in specifying this.
I have seen many commenters on this subject talking about how easy it is to spot what people are targeting for a page based on the Meta Keywords, which is admittedly true, but it is also fairly easy to look at the words in a title tag, which are much more likely to have an impact on whether that website will rank for those terms. It’s also much more likely to be in an order of importance to that client, as the most important phrases will nearly always appear at the front of a title tag, giving you greater insight into what is being targeted to that page than merely looking at an unordered list of phrases in the Meta Keywords tag.
Meta Descriptions Tag
However, the real point that was quietly made here in this blog is that the Meta Description tag is not used in ranking placement determination. They do say that they use the snippet in this tag in the SERP, which can really impact on click throughs once a ranking position has been determined for that page, so there is still an official reason from Google to using this tag.
I don’t think that this statement about Meta Descriptions is completely true. There are a few reasons for this
If Google doesn’t use the Meta Descriptions tag as a ranking factor, then why does it alert you in Google Webmaster Tools if there are duplicate Meta Descriptions used on the website? Or short ones?
One explanation for this would be that they are helping to let you know about this to help you fix these issues, and allows you to test if different descriptions help improve your click through rates from a SERP for that page. It also lets you know about short ones, which again may impact on click throughs.
However, and this is the big one, and something I have frequently seen – why does having duplicate Meta Descriptions adversely effect the rankings for all of the website? I’ve seen this enough times, on enough websites of various domain authority to be pretty sure that this is an issue.
So, my take on this in light of these Google comments, is that the content used in the Meta Description tag isn’t going to influence an improvement in ranking positions for any of the phrases that appear in here, and this is their justification for saying that this phrase is not a ranking factor.
However, when misused (i.e. having the same Meta Description on every page), I strongly believe that this seen as a negative ranking factor, and is going to prevent the website from ranking to its maximum potential.
What are anyone elses thoughts on the topic?
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My understanding is that meta descriptions are not used for keyword relevance or directly in ranking algorithm.. however a well written description is likely to give your page a better CTR from SERPS which may well help increase ranking.
Ranking issues with duplicate meta descriptions are far more likely to be an indexation issue IMHO. In my experience Google tend to index less pages from a site when they all have identical meta descriptions – you are essentially telling Google that the pages are about the same thing. Making all your descriptions unique (or removing that tag completely) usually causes more pages to get indexed on large sites, which of course will mean more potential for search traffic.
As of my experience meta keywords tag may not be a ranking factor but meta description is a factor which will defiantly consider as a ranking factor. Description tag plays a vital role in click through rate as Google may consider ct rate for ranking . So indirectly desc tag is considered as a ranking factor
may be….
I think I agree with you there Rob – I often say to clients that having duplicate titles or descriptions tags are essentially telling the search engines to expect every page on a website to have the same content, which reduces the chances of all of those pages being indexed.
I think we are all agreed here, that at least indirectly the Meta Description continues to play an important role in a websites overall traffic potential, although debatably whether or not it is a factor in a specific ranking for a particular phrase.
I was talking more generally about the ranking potential of the website being reduced by misuse of the Meta Descriptions tag, which is really an indexation issue, rather than a specific ranking factor for a particular phrase.