Does Google Care About Your Keywords Meta Tag

Google does not use the “Keywords” meta tag for its web ranking. Matt Cutt, Software engineer at Google, has explained in the embedded video below that this keyword was used a lot for spamming purposes. He also went ahead in explaining that it is not necessarily used for spamming, but is a good way that people could use this as a possible means. Hence Google has chosen not to consider the Keywords tag while crawling as site.

Although this is one constant question that is raised, a claim made by Google’s Software engineer Matt Cutt, is that although the other tags in the Meta tags can be useful the ”Keywords” tag is not at all used for Google’s website rankings. Google says that just because the other search engines may or may not use the keywords tag for ranking purposes, it would not use it at all.

It has also been confirmed on Google’s blog that the search engine does not use Meta Keyword tags for their search rankings. Although a lot of the newer SEO’s are not aware of this, the older ones are well aware of the fact that the keywords meta tag is ignored by Google.
In the embedded video below, Matt Cutts, the Google’s official liaison with the SEO community has reiterated the same as on the website blog. Watch the video for a better explanation.
This step taken by Google was aimed at reducing confusion and legal lawsuits involving website using better ranked websites as keywords in their Keywords meta tag.

In the video, Matt Cutt also explains in brief how the Description Meta tag is used to display a short brief of the website during a snippet view. In his words,
“Even though we sometimes use the description Meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.”
This ignoring of the Keywords Meta tag has actually increased the importance of the description Meta tag. Some SEO’s still do spend a lot of time on the keywords and description Meta tags since other search engines are still using the Meta tag for its search rankings.
The future of SEO tagging although is getting more and more complex by the day, the webmasters have been finding work around ways to keep their rankings up. It’s all about staying in the business and survival. It is working towards getting more and more towards links and content and less about the code and tags.
This step taken by Google is in view to be able to get the websites to create rankings through giving good user experience rather than just push anything as a result of a search. This is also to ensure that the websites provide proper information rather than just anything.

An indirect interpretation is that the webmaster should develop quality content which would automatically get its rankings rather than using false means to get the rankings. Google is only trying to make people play the game by the rules.