What are Meta Keywords?

In the 1990s, search engines such as Infoseek and AltaVista popularized the keywords meta tag, and back then it may have been a ranking factor because it signaled a page’s topics to search engine crawlers. Those days are over, but the tag still shows up in old templates and SEO checklists, so it’s worth knowing exactly where it stands.

What a meta keywords tag looks like

The tag sits in the head section of a page’s HTML, alongside other meta tags. A typical example:

<meta name="keywords" content="web hosting, WordPress hosting, domain names">

Visitors never see it on the rendered page. The list exists only in the source code, which anyone can open and read.

Why search engines stopped using meta keywords

Google announced in September 2009 that it does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking. The tag was so easy to abuse with keyword stuffing that Google had already been disregarding it for years by the time it said so publicly. Bing called the tag “dead in terms of SEO value” in 2014, and Bing’s Christi Olson repeated in May 2020, “we exclude it and ignore it” (both statements are documented by Search Engine Roundtable). Google’s current list of supported meta tags leaves keywords out entirely.

One exception: Yandex

Russia’s Yandex still reads the tag. As of August 2026, its webmaster documentation lists keywords among the meta tags its indexing bot takes into account and says the tag “can influence the page’s relevance to search queries.” Unless you’re targeting searchers in Russia, that doesn’t change the advice: skip the tag.

Removing leftover meta keywords

Old meta keywords don’t hurt your Google or Bing ranking. Both engines ignore the tag entirely, so there’s no penalty for leaving it in place, and removing it is safe housekeeping. There’s one concrete reason to bother: a stuffed keywords tag publishes your target keyword list in your source code, where competitors can mine it. Don’t add new ones, and spend the effort on tags engines still read.

Meta keywords vs. meta description and title tag

Meta keywords are one of many meta tags. Here’s how the three head-section elements SEO checklists mention most compare today:

• Meta keywords: invisible to visitors. For Google and Bing, the tag has no effect on ranking or on how your page appears in results.
• Meta description: often used by Google to build your search snippet. It doesn’t change ranking directly, but it influences whether people click.
• Title tag: a ranking signal and a primary input for the title of your search snippet, though search engines may rewrite the title they display.

If you prioritize just two search-facing elements in the head section, make them the title element and the meta description.

Meta keywords as internal CMS labels

Some marketers still repurpose the field as internal labels in their content management system (CMS). Used consistently, those labels can help an editorial team spot overlapping keyword targets and keyword cannibalization across a site. That’s a workflow choice rather than SEO: the tag does nothing for ranking either way.