Here’s word straight from the horses mouth, for all the people who didn’t believe me (LOL), Google does not use keyword meta tags to determine search ranking on Google.com. Google Webmaster Central Blog explains with a video and Q&A on why Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.

Does this mean we should all rush to remove the tags or stop using them? No, there are other search engines that use them and who knows, Google may find a need for them in the future. So, we still have to do our due diligence in keyword research, effectively adding the keywords to our content, and basically continuing with our general keyword strategy. We just have to have it in the back of our mind that Google is going to ignore the keyword meta tag.

Google still uses the description meta tag to grab a description of the page to display on the search engine results page, but this tag does not hold any weight in the search engine ranking. Basically, keep SEOing your pages, but don’t look to gain an advantage from Google for keyword and description meta tags.

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