Meta keywords are an HTML tag that lists a page's keywords, separated by commas, inside the document's <head>. Google has not used them since 2009, and its current documentation says they have no effect on indexing or ranking.
If your site still generates them, you are not losing rankings. You are publishing, in plain view in the source code of every page, the list of keywords you are working on. Removing them is a template change, not an urgent fix.
What the tag looks like
It sits in the <head>, is not visible to anyone reading the page and looks like this:
<meta name="keywords" content="running shoes, trail running shoes, men's running shoes">It is still valid HTML. No validator flags it as an error, no browser complains, and that is why it has survived in templates for twenty years without anyone noticing. The gap between "valid" and "read by anyone" is the whole point of this entry.
Who reads it, engine by engine
The official positions do not match, and that is the only reason it is still worth talking about.
| Engine | What it says | Source and year |
|---|---|---|
| Does not use it. No effect on indexing or ranking | Search Central documentation, updated 10 December 2025 | |
| Bing | Does not reward it. Historically used to spot spam | Duane Forrester, via Search Engine Land, 2011 |
| Yandex | Lists it among the meta tags it takes into account, as something that may affect the page's relevance to queries | Yandex Webmaster documentation |
| Yahoo | Stopped using it in 2009 | Reported by Yoast |
Yandex is the only one of the four that still keeps it on its official list of tags it reads. That matters only if you target Russian-speaking markets. For all the other traffic reaching a UK or international site, the row that decides is the first one.
2009, and what the documentation says today
In September 2009 Google published a post on its webmaster blog titled "Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking". The reasoning was explicit: about ten years earlier, site owners had started filling the field with irrelevant terms that users never saw, and Google had responded by no longer reading it.
It is the same pattern that made half the 1990s toolbox useless: a signal the webmaster controls completely and nobody checks lasts until it is abused. Keyword stuffing in the meta tag was the textbook case, and the mechanism repeats every time a black hat SEO technique becomes widespread enough to be detectable.
Most pages about meta keywords stop at that 2009 post. Google's official documentation is more recent and blunter: in the section on unsupported tags on its meta tags page, updated on 10 December 2025, it says that "the meta-keyword tag is not used by Google Search, and it has no effect on indexing and ranking at all". Not "it matters little", not "it is a weak signal": no effect.
The real cost is not rankings
If the tag does nothing, leaving it in should make no difference. It does, for three reasons that have little to do with ranking.
The first is that the field is public. Anyone who opens the source of your category page can read the list of terms you have decided to target, without needing a tool. A competitor doing serious keyword research will not learn much from it, because they already have that data. But you are giving away the part of the strategy that usually costs the most: what you chose not to do.
The second is a small but real risk on Bing. In 2011 Duane Forrester, then in charge of Bing's webmaster programme, described the tag as one signal among the roughly thousand that Bing analyses. In the same article Search Engine Land made clear that the signal works the other way round: a page with thirty terms crammed into the keywords field looks like the spam Bing is looking for. In 2014, Yoast reports, Bing called it "dead in terms of SEO value".
The third is editorial time. In many back offices the field is still there, at the top of the form, and someone fills it in for every article. Two minutes a piece across two hundred pieces a year comes to almost seven hours, spent on data nobody will read.
How to check whether your site still generates them
You do not need an audit. Open any page, view the source with Ctrl+U and search for name="keywords". From the command line, over a list of URLs, this is enough:
curl -s https://yoursite.com/page/ | grep -i 'name="keywords"'If you are on WordPress with Yoast SEO and the tag still appears, it is not Yoast: the feature was removed in version 6.3, released on 13 February 2018. In that case it comes from the theme, from a second SEO plugin left active or from an old custom field. On other platforms the field has often survived for compatibility with old installations.
Before deleting the field from the CMS, though, there is one check to make: find out whether the site's internal search engine is reading it. This is not a theoretical concern, it is the only use Google itself acknowledged for the tag. The 2009 post pointed out that the Google Search Appliance, the enterprise search product, could use it, unlike Google.com: that appliance was retired between 2016 and 2019, but the logic lives on in plenty of internal search engines. Deleting the field without looking is the quickest way to make internal search worse while believing you are doing technical housekeeping.
news_keywords is a different tag, and it no longer exists
In 2012 Google introduced news_keywords, a meta tag for Google News publishers, meant to state an article's terms when the headline was creative or ambiguous. It is the tag that sometimes gets confused with classic meta keywords, partly because it was written the same way.
Support was dropped in autumn 2017, when Google removed it from the documentation without any announcement. John Mueller confirmed it later, and an official update in February 2018 admitted the help content had been removed "last fall". If you still find it in a publisher's template, it is a leftover, not a feature.
What is worth filling in instead
The two meta tags Google really uses are the meta title, which carries weight for rankings and for what users see in the SERP, and the meta description, which is not a ranking factor but decides how many of the people who see you then click. They are the same two fields your CMS shows on the same screen as the keywords field: the difference is that someone reads these.
The rest of the work is in the page copy, not the metadata. Anyone expecting a list of terms in the <head> to make up for content that does not answer the question is believing a more technical version of the same misunderstanding behind many of the SEO myths still going round. If the list of tags to fix on your site is long and you do not know where to start, that is exactly the kind of priority we set in the SEO projects we run.
One last thing, which usually goes unsaid. On old sites, a filled-in keywords field is often the only written record of what someone thought the page was meant to be. Before emptying it in bulk across an archive of a thousand URLs, an export is worth the ten minutes it takes: not for SEO, but because on quite a few of those pages it is the only documentation there is.
Meta keywords FAQs
No, not on Google. The official Search Central documentation says the tag is not used and has no effect at all on indexing or ranking. Bing does not reward it and has historically used it to spot spam. The only major engine that still keeps it on its list of tags it considers is Yandex.
It is not urgent and you will not gain rankings by removing them. It makes sense to do it when you are working on the template for other reasons. Before emptying the field across the whole archive, check that the site's internal search engine is not reading it, and keep an export of the values.
Google does not read them, so it cannot penalise you for what you put in them. The limited risk is on Bing: a field stuffed with dozens of terms looks like the patterns the engine uses to identify spam.
No. The feature was removed in Yoast SEO 6.3, released on 13 February 2018. If the tag still appears in the source of a WordPress site, it comes from the theme, from a second active SEO plugin or from an old custom field.
Meta keywords are an HTML tag published in the page code and read (or ignored) by search engines. The focus keyword is an internal field in plugins such as Yoast: it stays in your database, helps you check whether the page is optimised for a term and is never published in the HTML.
