META Keywords Don't Matter According to US Court
At Search Engine Land, Barry writes about how a US court has decided that META keywords don't matter -- they are "immaterial." The tip came from Eric Goldman's blog where he writes about a recent case that held a company responsible for including trademarked terms in their meta tags.
In this case, because search engines don't use the actual META tags, there is no case. Jill Whalen says on Sphinn that you can test this easily by including a page with an arbitrary word and seeing if that word will come up in your search results once Google spiders the page.
META keywords are not discussed in this Google Help document which should support the law's findings.
However, as another member points out, Yahoo may be using these keywords to rank. In other words, the US Court is overly focused on Google, but perhaps they should weigh in on other search engines.
Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.
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Tamar Weinberg in Search Engine Industry News at April 28, 2008 10:22 AM
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The keywords meta tag was still being used by Yahoo! and Ask the last time I tested them, but its impact seems to be minimal.
All of the search engines use the meta description tag for their listings but not for rankings, so far as anyone has been able to determine.
The court's ruling is technically correct (it doesn't say meta tags don't matter -- just that they don't have any significant impact).
People should NOT be ignoring their meta tags just because Google doesn't index the keywords tag. That's the wrong message to take away from this case.
Posted by Michael Martinez at April 28, 2008 14:44