The landscape of Search Engine Optimisation has been changing for some time now, with several internet search engine companies altering their algorithms to help in achieving a more focused output for their users.
The latest news on this topic relates to Internet giant Yahoo, who have now moved in line with several of their rivals by removing the meta keyword tag from their search statistics.
The meta keyword tag is used by companies to describe the context of their business purpose. However, in the past several individuals abused this tool, flooding their sites with irrelevant keywords in an attempt to force their sites to the top of the search engines.
Yahoo’s announcement came during the Ask The Search Engines: Best Practices Edition at the SMX East conference and it came as a bit of a shock for those in attendance.
The statement was made by Cris Pierry who is the Senior Director of Search at Yahoo and left those in attendance baffled and confused as to why no statement had been made earlier, especially when it became apparent that the decision to stop using meta keyword tags in their search utility over two months earlier. There was no explanation given for this.
With the new structure in place it seems likely that a lot of web developers around the world will be frantically trying to clear up their code and realign themselves with the new requirements of the new algorithms.
The question remains, should we still bother to use the meta keyword tag when developing our websites? Well there is nothing wrong with using it in a structured way to generate traffic for our sites from other operators who still use meta keywords and who knows, when people stop abusing the system maybe the main search engines will return to using them once again.
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