In a new episode of #AskGooglebot, Google employee John Mueller answered a question about how the search engine uses the keywords meta tag.
Mueller recalled that Matt Cutts, former head of Google’s web spam team, answered this question back in 2009: the search engine does not use the keywords meta tag in rankings. Since then, nothing has changed in this regard.
“We don’t use the content of the keywords meta tag in Google search,” Muller added.
However, webmasters can still use this meta tag if they wish. It won’t cause any problems with Google, notes NIX Solutions.
For up-to-date information on which meta tags Google uses in search, see the help article.
Frequent meta tags used by the search engine:
- Description
- Robots
- Title (but with a caveat because it’s not technically a meta tag, but is often treated as such, Muller noted)
These are the elements that can really influence page rankings in Google.