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Research: Rebirth of the Keyword Meta Tag?
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| Posted by chris on Thursday, January 09 @ 10:18:13 EST
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 I knew there was a reason I still spent the short time it takes to create meta keywords tags on several sites.
Okay, I admit the title of this article is a little exaggerated and maybe over emphasing the point. And I don't want to draw people in to thinking that the keyword meta tag is worth spending a significant amount of time and effort on, or that it counts significantly to ranking. Because, frankly, it does not.
However, as I read the latest High Rankings Newsletter, Jill Whalen said something that prompted my braincells in to gear.
Changing your Meta tags will have little if any effect on your search engine rankings in any engine. This is especially true with Google, as they don't even look at the keyword Meta tag. (Only Inktomi and Teoma currently utilize the Meta keyword tag.)
This is significant because I feel that the new hotbot is absolutely brilliant (it's now the search site I visit before all others), and if you scroll across the engines it uses then 50% of them use meta tags. Given Hotbot's usefulness, that can only be seen as a rise in their importance. Not a big rise, but a rise. By which I mean it probably wouldn't convince anybody with large sites, but for very small sites it might where it really is just 30 seconds of time (don't bother concentrating too heavily on them).
More significantly, because I Hotbot is such a useful interface I believe that the engines it shows are those most worth concentrating on at present. Teoma, therefore is beginning to be more significant in my book. |
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