In fact, Cutts mentions that people have sued each other for meta tag keyword theft, when really this is just a waste of everybody’s time, because they don’t even play a role in the ranking of sites on Google. Have you been under the impression that the keywords meta tag was important to ranking in Google? Comment here.

"About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called "off-page" factors such as the links pointing to a web page," says Cutts. "In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag."

Just because Google ignores the "keywords" meta tag, that doesn’t mean it ignores all meta tags. In fact, there are several that the search engine definitely uses. For one, Google sometimes uses the "description" meta tag as the text for search results snippets. But even then, the "description" meta tag isn’t used to influence ranking.

Google also recognizes the "google," "robots," "verify-v1," "content type," and "refresh" meta tags. Information about how Google understands these can be found at this page in the Webmaster Tools help center.

"It’s possible that Google could use this information in the future, but it’s unlikely," Cutts says of the "keywords" meta tag. "Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years and currently we see no need to change that policy."

So the moral of the story is, if a competitor is jacking your keywords, and using them in their own "keywords" meta tag, this will have no effect whatsoever in how they rank in Google when compared to your site. Cutts says other search engines might use the information, but Google doesn’t.

Google does note that its enterprise Search Appliance has the ability to match meta tags, but this is of course separate from Google web search.

As I have said before, these videos and other tips Google frequently gives out are worth paying attention to for any webmaster looking to rank well. Whether they’re talking about duplicate content, meta tags, or paid links, they’re all aimed at telling webmasters how it is, and clarifying any misconceptions to the contrary. Whether you agree with Google’s methods in all cases or not, the tips are for your benefit.

Like it or not, Google controls what people find on the web when they search. The company’s huge market share is just something that is. There is always the possibility that could change in the future, but at this point, it looks like webmasters are not going to be able to ignore Google for a long time, if they hope to be found on the web by searchers.

We realize (and Google surely does too) that many well-seasoned marketers already know that Google ignores the "keywords" meta tag, but webmasters are born everyday, and not all of them have been so heavily seasoned to this point, and that’s why Google puts this information out there. There is always misinformation (particularly when it comes to search), and sometimes the record just has to be set straight. Who better to do that than Google itself?

Do you find Google’s Webmaster Central videos useful or do you think they’re mostly just retreads of things you already know? Share your thoughts here.

Webmasters who want to control their content and its entry into search indexes sometimes turn to the NOINDEX meta tag to help. Here’s the problem: it isn’t being handled consistently at the major search engines, according to Cutts. Even Google isn’t sure what to do with pages tagged as NOINDEX.

“The question is whether Google should completely drop a NOINDEX’ed page from our search results vs. show a reference to the page, or something in between?” Cutts said in his post. Options fall into one of three possibilities: drop a NOINDEX page from the index, show links/references to those pages, or find some other middle ground.

Naturally the topic has generated some webmaster debate. One commenter at Cutts’ post said it’s “disrespectful” to index something marked as NOINDEX. Most of the follow-up comments expressed similar sentiments.

You can express yours in the comment section below, too.

John Mueller placed a useful post from Zurich on the Webmaster Central blog at Google, where he delves into the issue of meta tags. Back in the day, meta tags like ‘keywords’ helped webmasters get their sites indexed appropriately.

It took next to no time for spammers to start clogging ‘keywords’ to the point where they became useless. As Mueller reminded everyone in an answer to a comment, Google isn’t looking at them for indexing purposes:

(W)e generally ignore the contents of the "keywords" meta tag. As with other possible meta tags, feel free to place it on your pages if you can use it for other purposes – it won’t count against you.

Plenty of tags do work favorably for pages, as do Sitemaps, which enjoy support from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Meta tags can control robot behavior, or in the case of an individual crawler like Google’s Googlebot, affect a single robot’s actions with certain directives like meta name=robots or name=googlebot:

Google understands the following values (when specifying multiple values, separate them with a comma):

noindex: prevents the page from being indexed (see "Block or remove pages using meta tags")

nofollow: don't follow links from this page when looking for new pages to crawl (also see "Block or remove pages using meta tags")

nosnippet: don't show a snippet of this page when displaying it in the search results (see "Prevent or remove snippets")

noodp: don't use text from ODP (The Open Directory Project a.k.a. dmoz.org) to generate a title or snippet for this page (see "How do I change my site's title and description?")

noarchive: don't display a "Cached" link for this page in the search results (see "Prevent or remove cached pages")

unavailable_after:[date]: remove this page from the search results after the specified date and time (see "Robots Exclusion Protocol: now with even more flexibility")

Mueller noted the default rule is "index, follow" when this meta tag is not in place on a page, or if it is not targeted to the visiting spider when it arrives.

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In my SEO blog reading yesterday, I first found a post by Danny Sullivan about meta tags. Then just this morning I read a post by Matt McGee also about meta tags and he makes the same point:

The Keywords meta tag is useless, except for misspellings.

If your page has a product, service, or keyword that can be misspelled, instead of intentionally misspelling the word in your text, use your keywords meta tag. It won’t get you page 1 placement necessarily, but it definitely makes a difference.

If I had say in the Googlerithm, I would tie the spelling functions with the search functions, and if a page ranked well for a certain phrase, but the user misspelled the phrase, I would certainly give more relevance to a page that had the misspelling on it (albeit in a keyword meta tag).

With that said, I would certainly not focus much time at all working on the keywords meta tag, but while you’re under the hood making changes to your site, it wouldn’t hurt.

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