[Transcript of the video is included]

From the mouth of the lion himself, Matt Cutts explains in this video that Google no longer takes the meta keyword tag into much consideration.  Although it might be hard to take for some of us that painstakingly coded meta keywords by hand for extensive online catalogs, fear not, other search engines may still rely on that information for help in ranking their indices.  I have included a transcript of the video below.  I can now recite the explanation by Matt Cutts because I had to “rewind” so many times…good stuff.

From Matt Cutts at Google talking about the keyword meta tags and the importance of meta description.

“So let’s talk about that in a little more detail because sometimes people file lawsuits. Alice has alice.com and Bob has bob.com and maybe Bob takes Alice’s name and puts it into the keyword meta tags and Alice sees that and she gets really angry and she talks to Bob and maybe sues Bob.  Well, how much should Alice be worried about Bob using that one term, Alice, in the keywords meta tag?  The answer is, we (Google) don’t use the keywords meta tag in our (Google’s) search ranking; other search engines might, but Google doesn’t.  But for our main core web search, whenever we look at the keywords meta tag, we say, you know what, too many people have spammed that too much; we really just don’t use this information at all. Now that’s not too say we don’t use any meta tags.  For example, there’s one called meta description and often times if you have a good meta description tag, we will use that info or part of that info in our snippet. So, if we’re going to return alice.com and your meta description is something really useful, we might show that as a snippet in the search results.  But if you’re looking at the keyword meta tags, we really don’t use that at all so don’t bother to get frustrated if somebody else is using your name in the keyword meta tags. It’s really not worth suing someone over because, at least for Google, we don’t use that information in our ranking even in the least little bit.”