Re: [Bug 6853] New: restore meta keywords, search engines use them

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 8:03 AM, Julian Reschke<julian.reschke@gmx.de> wrote:
> Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>>
>> ...
>> http://searchenginewatch.com/2165061
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_element#The_keywords_attribute
>> http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#f5
>> http://www.searchengineguide.com/richard-ball/meta-keywords-a.php
>>
>> Most search engines completely ignore it.  Yahoo still uses it, but
>> admits it places little importance on the value.  It's not clear
>> whether or not Google uses it, but the SEO experts in the SEOMOZ
>> article clearly believe it has little to no value when optimizing for
>> the big G.
>> ...
>
> Interesting, but no proof.
>
> I happen to know that a certain crawler I helped writing many years ago
> *does* extract keywords. Maybe it makes a difference on whether you're
> crawling "trusted" data or not, though.

Perhaps.  Does the crawler you worked on have the ability to trust its
documents?  @rel=keywords became completely poisoned on the public web
by people spamming it with repeated or irrelevant keywords (like porn
sites embedded completely unrelated things so they'll show up in
searches for more than just porn).

Depending on your burden of proof, you may *never* get an answer here.
 @rel=keywords was created by and for search engines, and it is in
search engine's best interests to be elusive about what they pay
attention to.  Current experts in the field of SEO clearly believe
that @rel=keywords is of little to no use in the real world, and
several (I linked two of them) bluntly recommend not using it at all.

> But that shouldn't influence the
> HTML5 language itself, only potentially advice on how and when to use it.

Possibly.  On the wide web, though, it is certainly a 'failed proposal'.

~TJ

Received on Wednesday, 19 August 2009 13:29:40 UTC