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Not sure what the benefit of removing them is.
It is believed that Inktomi still uses them (though with little weight), and the cost of keeping them is nil. Even the cost of adding a dozen or so to a new page is very small.
So, although I very much doubt that they help much, I still add them. Every little bit helps!
I'm certainly not an SEO expert by any stretch. But I recently chucked up a site that had my 'phase one' series of SEO techniques - namely the title, description, clean content (keyword rich, not many graphics), and meta tags (including keywords) all optimised as the good folk on this forum suggested.
After a bit of bouncing from pillar-to-post in Google, things seem to have settled down and Google is being rather kind to me.
So I wouldn't discount keywords if I were you. No harm in having them, and from what I gather since I've been on this forum you can never tell what's around the bend.
If I had to answer your question about how keywords are determined, based on my experience so far I'd say a little of everything goes a long way.
2odd...