Wow! Back and forth…forth and back. Let’s put this debate to bed right now!

Last week, they made it official. We’ve suspected it for a long time but now, all doubt has been removed. According to the Google Webmaster Central Blog, Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking. Matt Cutts, head of the web spam team at Google even confirmed on his personal blog that Google doesn’t use the keywords meta tag in web search (he’s also dropped a short video here also).

And yet the argument continues. Other search engines disagree, for instance Bing disputes what Google says. Well, this is a pretty simple argument to end, but a very important one! If you are even remotely concerned about traffic to your site… LISTEN UP!

Why Do We Even Care?
When a user goes to a search engine to find a site about Race Horses, the search engine scours its index to find the most relevant result for Race Horses. These results are then displayed for the user in the SERPs, or Search Engine Result Pages.

But how does the search engine know what your page is about? Well, the original thought was that web page authors would identify their own work by tagging each page with the keyword meta tag in the HTML header. This would make classifying and indexing pages much easier for the engines and help get your page in front of people interested in Race Horses. The authors get to specify what their page was about, the search spiders could quickly and easily catalog and index… win/win, right?

Right, So Why Is That Bad?
Because on the second day of the World Wide Web, some enterprising developer realized they could put whatever they wanted in the keyword tag, without regard to the ACTUAL content of the page, and thus, webspam was born. The problem here is that the author could SAY the page was about race horses, getting it indexed for race horses, only to show ads for everything but race horses when the user finally gets there. In fact, if the search engine depended on the keywords only, the (spammy) author wouldn’t even have to use the words race horse anywhere on the page! Ick!

But in the absence of any better way the spiders continued to crawl through the millions of pages of content, dutifully indexing the metatag keywords so they could give results to their users, until…

Along comes some bright Googler that hates spam as much as the rest of us, with a brilliant idea. Instead of depending on what the author SAYS the page contains (keyword meta tags), why don’t we just read the actual content of the page and figure out what its about. And thus, SEO was born… but that’s another post.

The upshot of this plan is that the author is now forced to write about a given topic thoroughly enough to convince the Google spider that the page is indeed about race horses. This gives Google a much higher quality index than those that still trust the author to give them the best data. This is why Google’s SERPS are FAR more valuable than any of the others… because of the quality of their index! Honestly, how many times have you NOT been able to find what you’re looking for via Google?

This may sound like more work for us as content authors but in reality, it is a boon. By reading the content and determining what the page is about, the spider may actually be able to do a better job than me! Sometimes I will get singularly focused on a particular point of the post and totally overlook another related and relevant point. That doesn’t happen with the Google bot though. Then there is the whole concept of improving your writing… but we won’t go there.

Ok, So Why Doesn’t Bing Care?
The short answer… beats me. Ok, so they’re probably not depending on the keyword meta tag exclusively, that would be dumb… but why depend on them at all? The simple fact that they can be gamed makes them useless (the point Google figured out many many moons ago) and totally undermines the value of their SERPS.

Alright, What Should I Do Differently?
Really… nothing. If you’ve been putting keywords in you post or have the plugin to convert tags and/or categories into keywords, keep doing it. Its not costing you anything, maybe a minute at the end of the post process. Besides, if Bing and others are looking at the keywords meta tag, it may help your ranking on their engine. If you haven’t been doing this, the I thank you sincerely for reading this far!

So, in the title I said I could prove it. Do you think I did? Do you disagree completely and thing the Big G is pulling a fast one to get us to look the other way? Let me hear from you in the comments!

Later,

@jtrigsby

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