It is official, Yahoo! is not longer considering the ‘keyword’ tag when ranking websites in their search results. Google stopped paying attention to these many eons ago but it seems Yahoo! has finally followed suit. It was just too easy to manipulate so I am not really surprised. This tidbit of info came out Tuesday during the SMX East conference.
For a long time, the industry some what made fun of Yahoo for using it (at all) for ranking purposes. Then, during the Q&A period of the session, Cris Pierry, Senior Director, Search, Yahoo said at 2:09pm (EST), that they no longer use the meta keywords tag for rankings. In fact, Yahoo stopped using it a “few months ago,” said Pierry.
I was kind of funny when Danny asked Cris, why didn’t Yahoo announce this? Cris basically shrug his shoulders. He then asked Cris, “are you sure?” Cris gave me a look, the look like, that was a dumb question, since he is the man now behind Yahoo Search.
So don’t bother optimizing (stuffing) your keyword meta tags anymore because none of the search engines really care!
After some SEO testing proved this to be incorrect Yahoo! stepped in with an explanation.
What changed with Yahoo’s ranking algorithms is that while we still index the meta keyword tag, the ranking importance given to meta keyword tags receives the lowest ranking signal in our system.
Words that appear in any other part of documents, including the body, title, description, anchor text etc., will take priority in ranking the document – the re-occurrence of these words in the meta keyword tag will not help in boosting the signal for these words. Therefore, keyword stuffing in the keyword tag will not help a page’s recall or ranking, it will actually have less effect than introducing those same words in the body of the document, or any other section.
However, when no other ranking signal is present, unique words that only appear in the meta keyword tag section of documents can still be used to recall these documents.
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