Meta Keywords

The meta keywords tag is an HTML element that lists the terms a page is about. It does nothing for rankings on Google or Bing, and has not for well over a decade. It survives in old templates, CMS settings and SEO checklists, which is why the question keeps coming up.

<meta name="keywords" content="british, typeface, font, motorway signs">

What was the meta keywords tag for?

The tag let a site owner tell search engines which words the page should be found for. In the late 1990s, when engines judged pages largely on their own content, that was a plausible input. The flaw was that visitors never saw the tag, so nothing stopped a site from filling it with popular terms unrelated to the page. Google’s own account is that keyword meta tags “quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords”, and that the abuse is why it stopped using them.¹

That objection applies to any self-declared signal a search engine cannot check against the page. Google’s John Mueller made the same argument about llms.txt in 2026.²

The tag is still valid HTML. keywords remains one of the standard metadata names in the HTML specification, which itself notes that “many search engines do not consider such keywords” because the feature “has historically been used unreliably and even misleadingly”.³ A validator will not flag it.

Does Google use meta keywords?

No. Google lists the tag among those it does not support: it “is not used by Google Search, and it has no effect on indexing and ranking at all”.⁴ Google explained its position in September 2009, in a post answering whether a competitor copying your brand name into their keywords tag should worry you. The answer was no, because Google’s web search “disregards keywords meta tag completely”.¹ Google’s site-search product takes the same line: Programmable Search Engine lists the tag among those it will not use “for sorting, biasing, and filtering search results”.⁵

Google News once documented a separate news_keywords tag for publishers. It removed the help page in 2017 without an announcement, and John Mueller confirmed in February 2018 that support had been dropped, adding that “keeping it on pages is fine, we just don’t use it for Google News anymore”.⁶

Does Bing use meta keywords?

Not as a ranking boost. Bing’s webmaster blog wrote in 2014 that “it’s pretty clear the meta keyword tag is dead in terms of SEO value” and that “as far as search goes, that tag flat lined years ago as a booster”.⁷

Does Yandex use meta keywords?

Yandex is the exception. Its table of supported meta tags gives keywords a single line: it “can influence the page’s relevance to search queries”.⁸ That is the whole of what Yandex says: no weight, and no indication of how often.

Whether that line matters depends on where your audience searches. StatCounter, which measures the share of page views that search engines send to sites carrying its tracking code, put Yandex at 70% of search referrals in Russia in August 2026, 38% in Belarus, 29% in Kazakhstan and 17% in Turkey, against 1% worldwide and 0.3% in the UK.⁹ A site targeting those first four markets loses nothing by filling the tag with a few accurate terms. Everyone else has nothing to gain from it.

Why do SEO plugins still mention meta keywords?

Mostly because of how long the belief has lasted. Yoast SEO removed its meta keywords field in version 6.3 in 2018. The “focus keyphrase” box that remains is an input to the plugin’s own content analysis, not a tag sent to search engines, and Yoast says of the focus keyphrase: “It’s not a signal that we give to search engines”.¹⁰ All in One SEO keeps a “Use Meta Keywords” setting, off by default, and its documentation says the setting is there for sites targeting Yandex.¹¹

If an older theme or plugin is still printing the tag, that is where it comes from. View the page source and search for name="keywords" to check.

Should you remove meta keywords from your site?

For most sites, yes, though there is no urgency. An existing tag has no effect on Google either way, so removing it will not move rankings. The practical reason to delete it is that it publishes, in your source code, a list of the terms you are targeting, which is free research for a competitor. Check your own site search first: some tools, including Elastic’s web crawler and Algolia’s Netlify plugin, copy the tag into their index by default, so removing it can change what your internal search returns, even though it changes nothing on Google.¹² If nothing depends on it, take it out the next time the template is being changed anyway.

The work the tag was meant to do belongs in the parts of the page that searchers and search engines both read: the title tag, the headings and the body copy.

Footnotes

1. Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking — Google Search Central ↩ ↩²

2. Google’s Mueller says llms.txt can’t help LLMs differentiate sites — Search Engine Journal ↩

3. The meta element: standard metadata names — HTML Standard ↩

4. Meta tags and attributes that Google supports — Google Search Central ↩

5. Meta tags — Programmable Search Engine Help ↩

6. Google News meta keywords tag no longer supported — Search Engine Roundtable, quoting John Mueller on X, 20 February 2018 ↩

7. Blame the meta keyword tag — Bing Webmaster Blog ↩

8. Meta tags — Yandex Webmaster Help ↩

9. Search engine market share — StatCounter, August 2026, filtered by country ↩

10. Meta keywords are no longer helpful for SEO — Yoast ↩

11. Meta keyword settings in All in One SEO — AIOSEO ↩

12. Web crawler schema — Elastic (version 8.x documentation) and Extraction strategy — Algolia ↩