Keywords meta tag: Useful or time waster?

Question

I always put meta keywords on my sites pages. But I have heard rumors that you do not have to do this. Should I continue putting keywords on my pages or is it just a waste o

Answer 1

This article says, that Google resigned from using META keywords many years ago due to the fact that they are easily abused.

Quote:

Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don't have any effect in our search ranking at present.

Answer 2

Well it's true that crawlers such as Google use much more sophisticated methods than simply META tags to decide PageRank and index pages, but I don't think that's any reason to necessarily remove them or not include them.

Other, less sophisticated crawlers may use it as a legitimate source of information, and so I suppose the only clear answer I can give is: if you don't want to limit your visibility to only the well established search engines which don't rely on the tags, then you might as well still include them. As long as you take into account that there are far more important methods of promoting your site (See Google Webmasters Education for example), you'll be fine.