This tests the belief that meta keywords are harmful to your site. Is it really harmful or is it otherwise?
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This test came from Ted Kubaitis. Ted has been hearing from a lot of people that meta keywords are harmful. Meta keywords is the most old school thing in SEO – you’ve got your meta title, meta description, meta keywords – and people are saying not to put meta keywords in because they are harming sites.
These are one of the things that we’ve been talking about and I think that is silly. I think they are just ignored. Ted run this through the system that he has for testing and what he said was that it is not a factor and if it’s harmful – it is really close. It resembles a smoking gun. It is a weird thing because I have often told people that I think putting meta keywords in is fine, it takes two seconds and it probably helps in Bing and you are probably not harming yourself.
This is one of the things that are, maybe not. What I think the lesson here is that I don’t really think there is a problem having one or two meta keywords, I think it is completely fine and I think it helps in Bing and Bing influences Yahoo, Verizon, AOL, they are all the same engine so it is probably not a bad thing to do, but don’t go crazy with it.
This has been the advice for some time, you shouldn’t go nuts on these kinds of things but it is also pretty interesting that it is possible that it could be bad, that it is really close so be super careful. I’d still tell my clients to do one but just be super careful with it and not get nuts because as Ted was seeing with his findings, they are right at the edge.