Okay,

I get the point that some search engines do not use some Meta Tag information any longer, but does it create any issue to still do your Meta Tags anyway? There are a lot more Search Engines crawling the Internet than Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It seems to me that keeping Meta Tag information within your code still serves a purpose.

Anybody?

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There is no harm in creating a keyword meta tag, although I still would not recommend stuffing it. Its not going to help or hurt.

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No harm at all.. The meta description is still important since it is often displayed as the the snippet of text in for your listing in the SERPs. Optimizing meta description tags can really help click-thru-rates and drive more organic traffic.

Meta keywords, however, have gone the way of the dinosaurs IMO. I still include them just for sh*ts and grins... maybe 5 keyword phrases or so... but that HTML/XHTML element is pretty much worthless except at the worst of engines which are probably not going to send you any traffic anyway.

I would disagree on the no harm part. Even though the contents of the keywords meta tag (and description) are no longer used as factors in determining rankings, I believe they would still be used as quality indicators. Search engines no longer want to rank pages based on text that user's won't see. However, that hidden text is still used to check for spam. I don't see any reason why search engines would stop checking the keywords meta tag for keyword stuffing, as a possible indication that the page is spammy.

I am not saying that having the keywords tag is harmful; I don't believe that it is. However, we now know that the tag provides no benefit, and I believe it could still trigger spam filters. If you have a keyword meta tag, make sure you don't have content that might be considered keyword stuffing.

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Agree with wige on this.

While a SE may not use meta info as a ranking metric, it doesn't mean they ignore it altogether. Filtering for example.

If you're going to use meta descriptions and keywords, make sure you do so properly.

The keywords tag can be useful if you're developing onsite search for example.

Dave

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I agree. I am guessing Google is still using it in their spam detection to identify sites keyword stuffing the tag. So stuffing it could possibly trigger a penalty. But that's likely all it's being used for these days.

I agree w/ crankydave also about on-site search. Our commercial site is CMS based. And we can flag fields on our CMS items as searchable. I flag the meta keywords field on all page items as searchable. So it's usefull internally in this regard.

No use of meta tag except meta description which display with site title in SERP. Found new announcement from Google regarding it through matt cuts article.. unfortunately forget the link

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Some of the SE not giving weight to meta description and meta keywords but that not mean they also ignore that tag.

They crawl these tag and also check that its in format not doing any spam or stuffing. So When you working for these tag always remember that now these tag is not too much important for few search engine but rest of search engine read it same and giving it value.

So make it in proper format so you get better result from every where.