meta keywords
Also called: meta keywords tag, keywords meta tag
The meta keywords tag is a legacy HTML meta element in a page's head that listed the keywords a page wanted to rank for. Google has ignored it for web ranking since 2009, and no major search engine treats it as a positive ranking signal today.
Why it stopped mattering
Google’s Search Central team explained back in 2009 that the tag “quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords,” so Google disregards it. Google’s current documentation is blunt: the meta keyword tag “is not used by Google Search, and it has no effect on indexing and ranking at all.” Bing agrees. In 2014, Duane Forrester wrote that the tag “is dead in terms of SEO value” and “flat lined years ago as a booster.”
The markup looks like this:
<meta name="keywords" content="running shoes, trail shoes, marathon">Filling it in earns you nothing, and because anyone can read it in view-source, it hands your target keyword list to competitors. Bing has also said it may read the tag as a spam signal: keywords that do not match your visible page can flag you, so a stuffed tag is pure downside with no upside.
Do not confuse it with the meta description, which engines do read to build the search snippet (it influences click-through, not ranking), or with the title tag, which is still a genuine on-page signal.
How it affects your traffic
Time spent curating a meta keywords tag is time not spent on the signals that actually move rankings: a keyword-led title, a snippet-worthy meta description, clean heading structure, and content that answers the query. Auditing and fixing those real on-page signals is what On-Page SEO work covers, and it is where the traffic gains live. Leaving a stuffed keywords tag in place is low risk on Google but a needless spam flag on Bing, so the cleanup is quick and worth doing during any page-level pass.
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