Meta Keywords Redundant

Nigel picked up on a very interesting piece of information with his article, Meta Keywords Redundant. As you can see Nigel is straight and to the point.

In the post, Nigel explains that Matt Cutts highlights some new information about meta keywords, mainly that google just don't care for them anymore. Having previously used meta keywords for typos or keywords that were otherwise not present in the page I had seen the value in using meta keywords for search engine matching (even if it did nothing for rankings).

Obviously the meta keywords tag has been abused in it's time and it only stands to reason it's probably given little to no value, but which is it...little, or no value?

I thought I'd do an experiment so I quit my job, added in a bogus keyword in the keyword meta tag and waited a couple of weeks for it to be indexed by Google (I didn't really quit my job). Funnily enough the website was crawled by other sites and the keyword extracted and used in wonderful ways (mainly for reporting in site valuation websites) and then evenetually Google got around to indexing the page themselves (verified by Google's cached version of the page). Searching for the keyword show's how it appears in the body of other websites, but clearly shows it's NOT matching the original website where it only appears in the keyword meta tag.

So does this prove conclusively that meta keywords are redundant? Not quite, I mean the keyword I used was pretty outrageous, and it wouldn't surprise me if Google's results were a little inconsistent in these tests (remember they have experimental code and try new things out on small subsets of users all the time).

From the testing I've done, and the chatter on the interwebs, meta keywords ARE redundant, Google's not checking for them (and why would they, webmasters abuse them) and everyone else is sure to follow. Frankly there are far better things you can be doing with your time so my advise, get some more fresh content on your site, do some good'old link building or just get away from the computer and have some fun, all more useful then injecting code in a tag nobody cares about anymore.

We will miss you keyword meta tags.