Does Yahoo Prefer Meta Keywords with Commas?

Should I Risk my Rankings to Change Over?

[garyr_h]

I just read over here: [webmasterworld.com...]

that Yahoo! prefers meta keywords with commas, how true is this and what evidence backs it up?

I have been ranking fairly well in Yahoo, and was just wondering if it was worth the risk to change the meta to include commas.

[jimbeetle]

There was a Mike Grehan interview with Yahoo's Jon Glick about two year's ago where Glick said yes, separate keywords or "tokens" by commas. Use it basically for mispellings, other local communities in which you might do business, things along those lines.

But on-page factors still basically rule, so I would probably go ahead with making the change. (Oh, and I guess I did two years ago ;))

[garyr_h]

Thanks for the sticky on the article. It had exactly what I wanted to know.

For anyone else who is wanting to know what is said here's a very important part:

'laptop computers' will count for 'laptop computers' and not 'laptop' or 'computers' separately. So doing it like that means that you're not going to be penalised for keyword spamming on the word 'computers'.

[Farout]

you're right.. that is an important point. Allways wondered about that, but never found the answer..
Thanks :)

[skuba]

I am not sure about it. By the quote you posted we would be allowed to abuse a word let's say "laptop computers, pc computers, mac computers, desktop computers, new computers, used computers, and so on..."

I think this could gwt you penalized for abusing the keyword computers.

Am I wrong?

Thanks

[CainIV]

Yahoo uses keywords for such a small part of rankings now that it's pretty much redundant.

Focus on the Title and meta description for clickthrus.

I have several sites that have ranked high and have 0 keywords in the meta whatsoever.

[ramachandra]

As for as my site is concern meta kw does not have commas for any keyphrase.

Now I am going to take a chance and include commas for keyphrases and closely watch whether it is going to effect any ranking positions for my site.

[Pankaj_lis]

In my openion keywords and phrases should be either seperated by a "," or "¦". It works well and faster.

[funandgames]

I have not used meta keywords on my sites for years and my rankings never changed. Just scrap them. All you are doing is helping your competitors by telling them what keywords you are striving for.

[garyr_h]

skuba, in the same article the Yahoo representative states that by using a phrase 'computer labtop' will not get rankings for 'laptop' or 'computer', each is an individual keyword phrase.

So the only way you could get penalized is by repeating 'computer laptop' more than once as a keyword phrase. It wouldn't help you anyways, so why do it?

As for telling competitors your keyword phrases, if they were smart enough to look at your meta tags for that, they would also be smart enough to use one of the other 10000 programs which tell keyword density of a page which would tell you even more than what the meta tags ever would about a site.

Besides, I believe Yahoo uses them more than 'just a little', as I have gotten some rankings by keywords mentioned only within the meta keywords, such as mispellings or other related words. Also, YPN uses them to help display their ads on your pages... which it definately needs at this point in time since it's usually way out there otherwise.