Metadata Keywords Tag Not Needed
It amazes me how many SEO folks still recommend that you pack your keywords into the meta keyword tag. Actually, it strikes me that there is a great risk in doing so. More often than not, people come up with a list of keywords for which they want their site to rank highly, then tack that list into the keyword meta tag content list on every page of the site. The reason this amazes me is that it is more clear than ever that search engines hate duplication. So why do people continue to give search engines the reason to apply a duplication penalty to each of their pages?
This is a particularly poignant question because the evidence that the keyword metadata tag does not even help with search rankings. There has been no evidence that it helps since Google's ascendancy. The keyword metadata tag is more of an unused artifact from the earliest age of the Internet than a truly valued piece of web page information. Yet, it persists in being popular.
If you are going to use it anyway, at least make sure that its contents are unique for every page of your site and that you are not just putting a long list of your best keywords into it on every page. Be judicious so that the tag only contains keywords that are relevant to the particular page on which they appear. If you do this much, while the keyword list probably won't actually help, at least it won't hurt to use it.
At Connweb, we tend to exclude the meta keyword tag from the pages we create, unless we get a specific request from the customer to include it anyway.
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