Why do web-developers still use meta-keywords and

Question

Google is not using meta-keywords tag at all because keywords are mostly used to spam search engines.

Google is not using the meta-description tag for ranking. Sometimes the meta-description tag is used for the site-snippet in search results if part of the content does not fit. But mostly meta-description is generated automatically from the content of the page and meta-description is the same as beginning of the content of the page.

Google has dropped the support of meta-keywords and meta-description tags for search ranking. Google handles about 92% of all search queries in the world. So now web-developers can stop using meta-keywords and meta-description meta tags, because spending time on them is not worth it.

Is there any real benefit for using meta-keywords and meta-description tags?

Links:

• Google Webmasters Blog about meta tags support by Google;
• Video with Matt Cutts about meta tags support by Google;
• StatCounter Search Engines stats usage - Google handles about 92% of all search queries in the world;

Answer 1

No, we should carry on using meta tags, because we don't, and shouldn't be, just supporting Google. The approach should be: make documents as indexable as possible using a search-engine agnostic approach, and then put special handling in for one or two top engines - such as using Google's online tools to improve search ranking.

Google are very dominant in search at present, but there's no guarantee they will always be on top. Maybe it will be Facebook in the future, or perhaps Yahoo/Bing etc. will dramatically improve search quality, and people will switch back.

Side note: for search, I really like DuckDuckGo at the moment. Lots of nice search shortcuts (see bang operators) and a meaningful privacy policy.

Answer 2

keywords:

• Google is not the only search engine. Google market share depends on many factors (country, age, technical know-how, …). Small percentages of big numbers are also big numbers.
• There are special purpose search engines (for niches; only crawling hand-selected sites; etc.) that might still consider it.
• Local search engines might use it. (Local) full text search engines anyway.
• Some CMS use it for site search.
• There are other consuming user-agents than search engines, e.g. parser/extractor.

description:

• it can be useful even for Google, e.g. when someone searches only for the title/domain of your site, Google would often display snippets like "Login / Register … back to top … please insert CAPTCHA … " etc. If a description is provided, it could be used instead.
• (the points mentionend under keywords are relevant for description, too.)

Answer 3

If google SEO is your only concern then meta keywords are a complete waste of time, but if you're targeting other search engines it may be worth investigating.

I believe Baidu still uses meta keywords, and that search engine is the dominant player in the Chinese market, so it'd be worth adding meta keywords if you want your site to be popular in China.

Regardless, I wouldn't go stuffing excessive numbers of irrelevant keywords in, as there is every chance that whatever search engine you're targeting will penalise you. 5-7 words summarising your page content is a good starting point.

Answer 4

We should use them because they are there. Who knows - perhaps they will be useful again in the future?

When the W3C drop them we can stop using them.

Just my opinion ofc...