The Meta Keywords Tag, the Most Common Finding We Raise

The meta keywords tag is the finding we raise more than any other. It is also the one that costs you nothing.

Across our stored reports it appears 280 times over 17 domains, more often than any other SEO finding. Its severity is info, the lowest band, and pointsLost is zero. The card tells you the tag has no effect on ranking and that no action is needed. All three of those statements are consistent, and the volume is what makes it look like a problem.

What the meta keywords tag does now

Search engines stopped using meta keywords for ranking years ago. The tag was a legitimate ranking input in the era when a search engine could not read page content well enough to work out what a page was about. Once they could, a list the publisher supplied about their own page became a worse signal than the page itself, and every major engine stopped reading it.

The specifics differ by engine and none of them publish a date, so the honest version is that it has not been a ranking input for a long time and there is no sign of that changing. What replaced it is the title element, the meta description for the snippet you see, and the page content for everything else.

A page carrying the tag is not penalised for carrying it. The finding says so, and it is worth repeating because the phrase "keyword stuffing" appears nearby and reads like a warning. What the finding is telling you is that the tag is inert.

When removing it is worth the minute

The tag exposes your keyword targeting to anyone who views your page source. That is public by definition, and for most sites it reveals nothing a competitor could not infer from the page itself.

Where it becomes worth a minute is a tag long enough to look careless. Our own sites carried one with 37 terms, and trimming it changes no ranking at all. What it changes is whether the markup looks maintained.

Seven findings in our store were long enough to raise the second variant and all seven were ours. On a third-party site, a normal meta keywords tag is what we see, at a median of twelve terms.

Why a zero-point finding appears at all

Every other check in the report maps to something with a cost. This one does not, and it is included because its absence from the list would be more confusing than its presence. Site owners search for it, agencies ask about it, and a report that stayed silent on a tag they have heard of would look like it had missed something.

That is a decision to answer the question, and it is why the severity is info and the points lost are zero. Where a report has more findings than it displays, these sort to the bottom. In a sample of sixty reports the info findings sat at position thirteen and fourteen out of an average of five displayed.

What to spend the minute on instead

If you are looking at this finding and wondering what to fix, the report almost always has something better in the list above it. Security headers, alt text and page weight each carry points, and each takes about as long as removing a meta tag.

Where the tag genuinely costs you something, it is the minute you just spent reading about it. Delete it if the tidiness appeals to you, and read the guide on missing meta descriptions if you want the tag that does control part of what a searcher reads.