

If you look at the HTML source code on an Amazon web page, you sometimes see the meta keywords tag in use. Each of these search engines values the meta keywords tag independently with other on-page optimization elements. Which Search Engines Use Meta Keywords?Īmazon, Yandex, and possibly Baidu and DuckDuckGo use meta keywords as a ranking factor. If you’re willing to stuff pointless keywords into the meta keywords tag, what else might you be inclined to do?” said Forrester. Ultimately, it’s the overt keyword stuffing that gets noticed and makes us want to look a little closer. “The main thing people need to keep in mind if they decide to use the tag is to follow the known best practices. In a 2011 interview with Danny Sullivan for Search Engine Land, Forrester confirmed that Bing may look at the meta keywords tag as a spam signal, not a ranking signal. Sure, it might have value for contextual ad systems or serve as a signal to bots plying the web looking for topics to target, but as far as search goes, that tag flat lined years ago as a booster.” Product Manager, announced that Bing stopped using meta keywords on the Microsoft Bing Blogs.įorrester wrote, “Today, it’s pretty clear the meta keyword tag is dead in terms of SEO value. Does Bing Use Meta Keywords?īing does not use meta keywords which means they exclude them and ignore this HTML meta tag for ranking purposes. The concepts apply for every content management system, including WordPress, Magento, Joomla, Drupal, Shopify, Wix, etc. If you want to learn more about the inner workings of search engine algorithms, then check out my guide on how SEO works in websites.

Google reported that “Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.”

In 2009, Google stopped using the meta keywords tag in web ranking because it quickly became an area where someone could stuff irrelevant keywords without visitors ever seeing those keywords. Google does not use meta keywords and they do not have any effect in its search ranking algorithm at present. Each search engine sets its own character length for the meta keywords tag and sticking to this limit will make sure that you do not use too many keywords in this HTML element. You should use no more than 10 meta keywords per page. However, most of the major search engines do not use meta keywords for SEO ranking purposes. Meta keywords are important for SEO for some search engines because the ranking algorithm uses the meta keywords tag to identify the core topics for the web page.
