Recently, Google’s Webmaster Blog has received a number of questions regarding the search engine’s use of meta keyword tags, specifically how they use them for ranking websites.
To my surprise, Google totally disregards meta keyword tags in ranking websites for the search engine!
So why do they not use these identifying features we put into our web pages?
In the late ‘90’s, Google and other search engines looked at only content and weren’t so concerned with the number of links pointing to a page like they do now. It didn’t take long for keyword meta tags to become a place where dishonest webmasters would stuff irrelevant keywords the public would never see to accelerate their rankings.
Since this abuse was becoming a problem, Google quit looking at keyword meta tags.
But meta description tags are useful and shouldn’t be disregarded in your web pages…search engines like Google sometimes use them in the page descriptions you see right under the link to your page in the search results.
But as far as your rankings are concerned, Google doesn’t use the meta description tag at all and it’s unlikely this information will be used in the future.
Read more about this on Google’s Webmaster Blog and watch the short video of Matt Cutts explaining how they use meta keyword description tags.