“Google neglects keywords meta tag in web ranking”

The google ‘officially’ announced that keywords meta tag are no longer part of the althogrim in web ranking on the webmaster central blog.  The Yahoo! also put an end to the keywords meta tag by explaining that they will ignore the said tags from their ranking althogrim.  What surprised me is that the Google had never explain the changes of their ranking althogrim on their official sites, and for this time, the Search Quality Team explained the reason behind the move!  Anyhow, I didn’t feel shock on the announcement, since I believe the Google has abandoned the keywords meta tags for somehow a decade already.

Okay, should we remove all the keywords meta tag then?

Personally, I do not suggest that.  Keep all the keywords tags and treat it as keyword insurance!  I can’t see there’s any harm to keep the tag.  I guess the said meta tags offer some kind of help in ’searching’ althogrim but not the ‘ranking’ althogrim.

What does the move implies?

As explained by the Google search team, the description meta tag would play a more important role in web ranking.    They do sometimes use the “description” meta tag as the text for our search results snippets. 

Even though they use the description meta tag for the snippets, they still don’t use the description meta tag in their rankings.   So, what should we do then?  Focus on the off-site optimization.  It means that we should create more inbound links with relevant site, so that you are getting voted from your friends and the Google will surely give you a credit on this (get the ‘juicy links!).    Do keep an eye on the Pagerank of your webpages though it only counts the number of inbound links you have, but not the value and relevancy of the said links

Erm.. Do you mean the On-site optimization is not important?

No, I didn’t mean that, but I believe the off-site optimization is much more important than before.   It might be the only way to guarantee the information seekers get the most relevant result from their search queries.   As described by the Google search team,  the keyword and descriptions meta tags might confuse the information seeker in some sense.

Looking at the future

Please take a look at the video search.   Guys, when you upload a new video onto the Youtube, you have to type in the title, description, tags and to select the right category for your video.   These elements are important since the ‘content’ of a video can’t be crawled by spiders.  Take into account the description meta tag and keywords meta tag are no longer to be used in web ranking, what should the web marketer do for optimizating a video page?    Usually, a video creates buzz from the audience and a vote will be given by the said audience.  They will usually to get the video embedded to their pages.   Anyway, I am still waiting for the new “3D” spiders for crawling the video.