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Posted on September 7, 2012May 18, 2022 by Jill Kocher Brown

Meta Keywords: Spam & Spy Wrapped into One

Excerpts from my latest article at NBC Chicago’s Inc. Well: “Why Meta Keyword Tags Are a Waste of Time.”

 

When discussing keywords and content optimization best practices, clients will invariably ask about meta keywords. Sorry, guys, but meta keywords have been dead to the major US search engines as ranking signals for nearly three years now. Google was the first to denounce meta keywords, then Yahoo! and Bing.

Once upon a time when the Internet was young and search algorithms hadn’t evolved independent methods to determine relevance and context, meta keywords allowed site owners to specify the keywords their content was relevant for.

Unfortunately, meta keywords were visible only as a signal to search engines. Humans never see meta keywords unless they enjoy staring at source code, which is not typical consumer behavior. Spammers everywhere rejoiced at the ability to stuff popular keywords into a page to improve its rankings without the human visitors ever seeing that nasty cruft behind the scenes.

Consequently, meta keywords were short-lived as a search engine ranking signal and quickly became nothing more than a spam signal. Or a traitorous avenue for competitors to spy on your optimization efforts….

Read the full article with all the details at NBC Chicago’s Inc. Well >>


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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

CategoriesSEO Tagsbing, google, metadata, spam

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