It’s not like this is any news, but it’s been speculated, and pretty easily proven as well that meta keyword tags are as useless to SEO as putting a 1500 keyword list at the bottom of the page: it may have worked in 1994, but not today. However, people still use them as there have been some cases where if the word was in the body text and meta keywords tag it gained a place or two.

Just to make it clear, Google doesn’t even bother with them. At all. Seriously. I’ve made my own tests and Google doesn’t care what you write there. Yahoo seems to, but in a limited way, and who cares about MSN anyway. But all in all, even if they do show up in Yahoo, they tend to have a really limited weight.

However, the legal field tends to misguide people into understanding that meta keywords are like billboards and that by adding a trademark into them you are in some way violating the safety of that brand because you’re telling people you’re them. I mean in theory that’s viable, even if it’s a longshot, but in practice those meta have nothing to do with that. I mean if someone’s searching for Coke, why shouldn’t Pepsi have a say in it. On the other hand, what’s Pepsi to do with people who search for Coke products? It’s debatable, but as a court has ruled recently, it seems meta keywords have zero to do with search optimization.

And that brings us to the main story here, it seems there was a lawsuit around 18th of April, Standard Process vs. Dr. Scott Banks (pdf file) where someone claimed“trademark infringement and false designation of origin” . It all started when the doc was denied resale rights to the products of Standard Inc. because they get their panties in a crunch if they’re sold online. All’s ok here, the doc resold them from pharmacies etc but kept the logo and stuff like that on the site (which I’d find normal since he sells their products) but he was forced to take them off because they “created the false impression that Dr. Banks was affiliated with Standard Process” which was again bad. He even went as far as to include a disclaimer that he’s got nothing to do with them.

However, the guys still sued him and it was their job to prove that they had a reason. But what we’re interested in is “Dr. Banks used Standard Process trademarks in the metatags of his website“. However this was a straightforward case where it was shown that “modern search engines make little if any use of
metatags.”. So a court has ruled that meta tags are literally unimportant. Also, it was seen that even when people search for the keyword and visit the doc’s site they get the original products, and also the doc is not a direct competitor.

It’s an interesting case so I advise you to read the entire PDF from the link above to see more details but all in all the bottom line is simple: don’t bother with meta tags. Actually, my advice would be don’t use the keywords tag anyway since a you don’t want to give your keywords to your competitors and b they aren’t useful for anything…

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