Number of Kewords in Keyword Tag

How to determine how many is too much?

[jsnively]

I've seen sites with a very large number of keywords in the keyword tag and I've heard that this isn't good. What are the consequences of doing this? The site I have in mind as an example has a fairly tight niche. But what they're doing is listing a keyword for each of the most popular item variation (a hypothetical example would be if someone is selling customized ball caps and listing all the sports teams and popular brand names they have available as keywords).

[maherphil]

The meta keywords tag is hardly used by any search engines anymore. I wouldn't put a giant list of keywords in there because your competition might come along an download your page source and see all the keywords you are after. This could eliminate hours of **** research that you did to get ahead of them!

[Robert Charlton]

This thread should answer your question. The meta keywords tag has been deemphasized quite a bit since it was posted, so most of the answers about the ineffectiveness of the tag are even more valid now than they were when posted.

Meta keywords and page copy
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