Post by shikharani00189 on Oct 31, 2024 2:17:40 GMT -5
Google has not taken into account the Keywords and Description meta tags for ages, at least to position web pages. These informative metadata tags originally provided useful information for the browser but invisible on the screen (in theory). In SEO, they played a major role in the ancestral versions of search engines, but this has not been the case for at least ten years.
Therefore, many SEOs often wonder about the interest off page seo service of these metadata tags. Often, we can even read that these tags are "ignored" or even not read by Google. The truth is a little nuanced as we will see at the end of the article...
However, let's remember the main point of our subject, namely that Google does not penalize meta Keywords tags that are spammed with keyword stuffing (for example). Gary Illyes confirmed this on Twitter after yet another question asked on the subject. The explanation comes from the fact that the search engine does not take into account the information in the meta tag in its algorithm (basically the data is neither specifically recorded in a database nor processed by a ranking algorithm), so the search engine has no reason to process the spam that the Keywords could contain. In short, if you were still wasting your time with this tag, imagine the number of hours you have lost in your life... :-)
Does Google Really Ignore the Meta Keywords Tag?
When a robot crawls a page, it does not "skip" any page sections , as we can clearly see in the "Explore as Google" tool of Google Search Console (the source code is complete, as is the page display). It therefore reads all of the content, including the meta Description and Keywords tags. Moreover, Gary Illyes does not clearly say that Google does not read the tag, but just that the search engine will not treat everything as negative or positive signals...
In the case of the description, it is certain that he reads it since we can find it in the snippets displayed in search engines. Spamming the description can therefore be problematic, and especially counterproductive!
In the case of Keywords, it is a little less clear. Indeed, many tests (a little dated) have shown that the keywords placed in Keywords could notably influence the display of advertisements managed by Adwords. By doing a quick search, I found several cases and I quote in particular the article by Olivier Andrieu published on Abondance.com in 2011. Of course, the article is old, but Google was already supposed to "ignore" the meta Keywords tag at that time. We therefore realize that it is read and taken into account.
If we read between the lines, here is what we should remember from this statement by Gary Illyes. On the one hand, Google really reads the Keywords meta tags, but not necessarily for positioning purposes. On the other hand, since these Keywords metadata have no impact on positioning, or at least they are not used for that, the search engine does not care at all if they are spammed. In other words, Google only penalizes what can be disturbing for the