Back in 2009, Google announced that they were no longer using the <meta name="keywords" /> to rank search results, and since then most search engines have followed suit.
Matt Cutts (a leader on the Google search team) said at the time:
To this day, you still see courts mistakenly believe that meta tags occupy a pivotal role in search rankings. We wanted to debunk that misconception, at least as it regards to Google. Google uses over two hundred signals in our web search rankings, but the keywords meta tag is not currently one of them, and I don’t believe it will be.
I hope this clarifies that the keywords meta tag is not something that you need to worry about, or at least not in Google.
In order to reduce confusion in our UI, and to prevent potential unintended mistakes that could cause search engines to reduce rankings, we’ve decided to remove the ability to specify META Keywords from Webflow’s UI altogether.
The following section will no longer be visible when editing a page in Webflow:
This change will be effective Friday, December 18th.
Also, sites that are republished on or after December 18th will no longer contain any <meta name="keywords" content="..."> tags (unless you add them manually via custom code includes).
Funny, especially since I just spent a day adding meta keywords to all my web pages. Good move on your part though and I applaud it. Just wish I knew this a day sooner
Genuinely, I’m amazed they’re still going. Yahoo was a default search engine when I started at my old job and was told we MUST use it??! The PC nearly went out the window it was so infuriating!
I didn’t realise that Google stopped using keywords so long ago, good to know now anyway, and great that Webflow is constantly updating new features, and getting rid of useless one.
I agree that we should all follow Google, but I also agree with Revolution on “our testing indicated (and still does) that bing and yahoo still checking meta-keywords”
We also have a client that wants to use his meta-keywords, whether we agree or not!
I just think rather than take something away from what we had, you should give the client “us” the choice to have the ability to use the meta-keywords if we want or not! otherwise this makes it hard work for use manually adding these in!
Maybe it would have been a good idea to add a warning “to prevent potential unintended mistakes that could cause search engines to reduce rankings” but still allow us to make our own choices?
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