Meta keywords tag was a common practice in SEO for any search engines, but you might not know that it’s been abandoned by most search engines, like Baidu.
Baidu’s engineer LEE, who is in charge of answering questions publicly about SEO, made it clear in August 2012 that meta keywords tag had become a history for Baidu, and Baidu totally ignores it. Here are the screenshots of his words in Chinese during a dialogue with Chinese webmasters:
And even long before Lee’s statement, some Chinese webmasters and SEOs had found that Baidu doesn’t include content of keywords tag in its search results at all.
It’s easy to understand why Baidu would neglect keywords tag – it’s very convenient to add, doesn’t have to be relevant with the body text and thus could be easily utilized by cheaters/blackhat SEOs, while such tags aren’t helpful to Baidu users at all.
And unfortunately the same logic also applies to Google – keyword tags aren’t useful for Google SEO either.
While adding meta keywords tag on your pages is not harmful to SEO of your websites directly, we don’t suggest you doing this for two reasons:
- By using keywords tag, your keyword ideas could be easily plagiarized by your competitors. They don’t bother to read your titles, descriptions and body texts to extract your keywords, all they have to do is to check your keywords tags, and they would be able to get all keywords on your website in 5 minutes.
- It’s totally waste of time. You ask your SEO specialists or agencies to find 3 or 5 best keywords at a time for each of your pages, and list them as keywords tags in delivery. Let’s forget the number of “best keywords” for the moment, although it could be a bad idea, only creating keywords tags would also need time, and for you as a SEO client, time is money. The more time your SEO agencies spend on your SEO projects, the higher rate you have to pay.
So the point is, you and your SEO agencies should focus on finding all potential keywords and creating great content, and of course, avoiding silly mistakes, not useless actions like adding keywords tags.