SEO | Google Ignores Keyword Meta Tag for Web Ranking.

SEO | Google Ignores Keyword Meta Tag for Web Ranking. Google’s Matt Cutts has explained in a video on Webmaster Central that Google doesn’t make use of keyword meta tag when computing search ranking.

About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.

Google does support several other meta tags. This meta tags page documents more info on several meta tags that we do use. For example, Google does sometimes use the “description” meta tag as the text for our search results snippets. While Google does show “description” snippet in search result, it doesn’t use it for computing web page rank.

So essentially, if some competitor copies your keywords and adds them to the meta tag of his/her webpage, this will have no effect in how the pages are ranked in Google when compared to your site.