Meta Keywords Tag

[jorje]

Dear all,

This topic may be already answered but i had read tha meta keywords dont really matter. Recently i run my site to a website that analyzes and wrote me this 'We found duplicate Meta Keywords Tags in this document which is not allowed' what do they mean that is not allowed? is there a penalty for this?

thank you in advance.

[edited by: mademetop at 10:50 am (utc) on Jan 6, 2013]
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[mademetop]

Meta keyword tags are not used normally by mainstream search engines in their ranking methodologies (though there are a few exceptions for SEs used in certain countries).

However, it is not a good idea to have identical tags on more than one page of a website and it is against normal conventions to have duplicate meta tags on the same page.

I doubt if you would get a penalty for anything to do with meta keyword tags - but having a mass of duplicate meta tags on the same page may flag a potential attempt at spamming if they are repeated on a page and anything that does that should be avoided.

Having the same content in meta tags on different pages is not useful but won't cause any penalty, but with keyword tags, unless you are using them for a specific purpose of your own (and not for search engines) leave them out. They don't help your rankings at all - so why use something that potentially could damage them through misuse, even if the chance is remote?

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld, jorje!

i agree with mademetop - meta keywords can't help, probably won't hurt, but done badly in duplicate it might hurt.
at best, serving meta keyword tags with your document is merely a waste of bandwidth.

[AlieenStewart]

Meta keywords tags are not a major factor search engines consider when ranking sites. Both the meta keywords tag and the meta description tag contribute to your search engine ranking. A meta keywords tag is supposed to be a brief description of the most important themes of your page. The meta keywords tag takes the following form:

<meta name="keywords" content="keywords, keyword, keyword phrase, etc.">

[edited by: coopster at 2:40 pm (utc) on Jan 7, 2013]
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