Are Spammy Meta Keywords Butchering Your Legitimate SEO Efforts?

If you are involved in web design development or SEO, you probably know something about the meta keywords tag. Before on pre-Florida versions of the Google algorithm, this tag played an important role in SEO, allowing the search engine spider to see which keywords a page was relevant to. While these tags probably still play some role in modern algorithms (such as for Jagger), they are no longer pulling their weight in SEO the way they used to. Nonetheless, SEO companies continue to optimise for meta keywords.

But if it isn’t adding benefit it won’t hurt your site, right?

While the benefit of meta keywords may have decreased, their importance to SEO may still exist - just not necessarily in a good way for some websites. There is speculations on many forums that Google is using a Bayesian type algorithm similar to the ones used for email spam filters. Such an algorithm might incorporate the volume of meta keywords, check against the probability of them being spam versus the occurrence of those keywords in the body copy of your web page. This would then help determine if the page is spam or not based on its similarity to known spam pages.

This would make sense, as a lot of older spam pages attempting to manipulate their SERP (search engine results page) results using old methods will have excessively long meta tags with keywords that aren’t necessarily found in the body copy of pages. By comparing other websites to these sites, it would be apparent if there were an obvious attempt to manipulate the SERP through meta spam. While it all makes sense, it is difficult to improve.

Currently we are conducting an experiment to see if reducing the number of meta keywords on an older page improves its SERP result. We have broken down the keywords of the pages involved and given these priority and have removed any redundant words, repeated words or words that don’t appear on the page, and we are testing different meta keyword lengths for each of the pages. We will post the results here in the next few weeks.