Back in the ‘90s, META tags allowed site owners a way to suggest to the search engines the most important terms they wanted to be found for.
When spammers started abusing them – some would stuff their META tags with hundreds of terms, often unrelated to their content – search engines started looking at other factors to rank websites.
Currently, none of the major search engines officially say they support it.
With newer algorithms that penalize duplicate content, continuing to use META keyword tags when the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) are ignoring them might not only be a waste of time, it could be harmful.
Having repetitive keywords on pages can result in the same filtering, and thus lower ranking, as duplicate content. The only way around this is to enter unique keywords for each page – extremely time consuming, so common practice now is not to enter them at all.
True, not using them will make it harder for your site to rank well on META-based search engines like Clusty and Dogpile, but in most cases those bring in only a small percentage of overall traffic to a website anyway.
Should you bother? That’s entirely up to you, but your decision should be a part of an overall search marketing strategy.
Kristina Smith is an Associate Writer with Single Entry Point Marketing. She brings 9 years of experience in online marketing, brand building, and copywriting, specializing in the advertising, publishing, and travel industries. She spends her free time 
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