Does The Keywords Metatag Affect SE Ranking?
Does The Keywords Metatag Affect SE Ranking?
The data suggests that conventional wisdom may be wrong! –by Jon Ricerca
Before the Yahoo/Google split, many webmasters had stopped using the keywords metatag agreeing with the well-nigh unanimous consensus that Google does not utilize the keywords metatag in any way for ranking.
Then, in February of 2004 when Yahoo stopped serving Google results in favor of their own, rumor had it that the new Yahoo results were just rehashed Inktomi results (the jury is still out on that one). It has always been rumored that Inktomi was the last search engine to use the keywords metatag in their ranking algorithm.
Now search engine traffic is roughly split between Yahoo and Google. Since it is rumored that Yahoo might still use Inktomi technology, and since it is rumored that Inktomi might use the keywords metatag for ranking, many webmasters are considering adding a keywords metatag back to their site.
Frankly, that's just too many rumors and not a lot of facts. So we decided to get the facts based on the actual data – i.e., actual rankings served up by Google and Yahoo!
What we found is going to dispel some popular rumors that we now know are completely false based on what we've learned directly from our research.
False rumors:
- The keywords metatag doesn't affect Google rankings at all. FALSE!
- Using a keywords metatag can't hurt you. FALSE!
- Using a keywords metatag will help you with Yahoo which is just a rehashed Inktomi that uses the keywords metatag. Sometimes false, sometimes true – depending on where you put your keywords in the metatag.
We've come to these conclusions based on a process that gathered the results of queries that were naturally performed, by hand, last month by a group of us analyzing the top results from the top two engines, Google and Yahoo! We then retrieved the webpages themselves that were listed in the top eight rankings and analyz...
