October 6th, 2009 by Nick

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Matt Cutts of Google recently made clear that meta keywords and meta descriptions do not affect your website’s ranking in Google.  For the non-technically inclined, here is a simplified explanation…

In the code of web pages, there are various places (sometimes called “tags”) where you can insert keywords that describe your website.  To what extent, if any, putting keywords into these places affects SEO has been the subject of disagreement.  In particular, some SEOs advocate stuffing keywords into the meta description and meta keyword tags as a way to gain higher Google rankings.

Meta tags in more detail

The meta keywords tag is only viewable to search engines, although it is possible for people to see it if they dig into the code of your web pages, where they’ll see something like this:

In the case of the meta description tag, both humans and search engines can see them.  When a user sees the meta description, it’s in search engine results pages.  For example, the words you see highlighted below are the words in Avvo’s meta description tag in Google when you search for “Seattle DUI lawyer”:

Okay, so what does this mean?

It’s no surprise that the meta keywords tag does not affect rankings.  In the early days of search engines, webmasters abused this tag by stuffing it full of keywords, and so search engines eventually started ignoring it.  As for the meta description tag, that it doesn’t affect Google rankings is more noteworthy because there are a fair number of people under the impression it can.

The problem with keyword stuffing meta description tags isn’t necessarily that it will hurt you; it’s simply a lost opportunity — humans read your meta descriptions in search engines, so it’s important to use them as billboards to entice people to click on your listings.  Attempting to optimize descriptions for search engines at the expense of human readers may turn people off from clicking through to your website.  And since you don’t get any rankings boost to compensate for the decreased click through rate, you’re probably worse off.

Reasons to still use the tags

Even though we know Google doesn’t use these meta tags for rankings, that doesn’t necessarily mean to disregard them completely.  First, Google isn’t the only search engine, and just because Google behaves a certain way, doesn’t mean other search engines like Yahoo and Bing will as well.  There is, in fact, evidence that Yahoo and Ask search engines use the meta keywords tag for retrieval, but not for rankings (check out this somewhat outdated article for details and for an explanation of rankings vs. retrieval).  So use of these tags may make more sense in other search engines.  Secondly, all search engines are constantly evolving, so who knows if one day the folks at Google will decide that they want to start using the meta keywords tag again for rankings.

Indirect effects on ranking

One thing Google did not discuss is indirect effect on ranking, particularly regarding the meta description tag.  For example, we know that when a user searches for a keyword on Google, if that keywords appears in the meta description tag they’re bolded. For example, a search in Google for “Seattle DUI lawyer” produces these results:

If Google rewards websites that are clicked more often with higher ranking, and having bolded keywords increases click through rate, then keywords in the meta description could indirectly affect ranking.

Lessons

-  If you do your own SEO, consider humans first when writing your meta descriptions and search engines second because they probably don’t affect rankings.

-  If you do your own SEO and you can easily fill in your meta keyword tag, then do it, but realize it probably won’t affect rankings.

-  If someone else manages your SEO, consider too much emphasis on meta keywords and meta descriptions a red flag (getting links to your website should be the focus, not stuffing your code full of keywords).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 9:52 am by Nick and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.