Meta keywords is a legacy HTML metadata tag that lists a page’s target keywords. RankGear still measures its presence and contents for comparison, but Google has not used it as a ranking signal for well over a decade.
| Term | Meta Keywords |
|---|---|
| Category | Page Structure and Technical SEO |
| Also known as | Meta Keywords Tag |
| Where it appears | Content Report and meta factors |
What it means in RankGear
In RankGear, meta keywords surfaces as a meta factor inside the Content Report. When RankGear scrapes a page, it looks in the rendered head for a <meta name="keywords"> tag, reads whatever comma-separated list it holds, and records whether the tag is present and what it contains. Because it lives among the meta factors, it sits alongside the title tag, meta description, and other head-level elements so you can see the full picture of how a page describes itself to machines.
How to interpret it
Treat this factor as a technical-conformance check, not an opportunity. RankGear reports whether the tag exists and how your page compares to the ranking set, but a present tag can still be empty, stuffed, or copied across every page on the site. If the top results overwhelmingly omit the tag, matching that pattern tells you little; the more useful reading is simply that meta keywords is not where competitive pages are winning. Spend the attention it would take on the title, headings, and body content instead.
Example
You run a Content Report for a product page and RankGear flags that eight of the top ten ranking pages carry no meta keywords tag at all, while your page lists twenty terms. That contrast is informational: the ranking pages are not relying on the tag, so adding or expanding one on yours is unlikely to move anything. The report has done its job by showing you where the real differences lie.
Important considerations
- Google confirmed years ago that it ignores the meta keywords tag for ranking, so presence or absence is a comparison point, not a lever.
- Correlation is not causation: a difference between your page and the ranking set on this factor describes what those pages happen to do, and does not mean the tag caused their positions.
- An overstuffed keywords tag can hand competitors a plain view of your target terms, so many sites deliberately leave it off.
- Provider-scraped values reflect the rendered DOM at crawl time; a tag injected late by JavaScript or blocked from the fetch may read differently than what you see in your CMS.
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.