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So we had an interesting question from someone who just asked me,
"How much do you use the keyword or keywords meta tag in your main search results?"
And the answer is, basically not at all.
So let's talk about that in a little more detail because sometimes people file lawsuits,
you know Alice has alice.com and Bob has bob.com, and maybe Bob takes Alice's name
and puts it in the keyword meta tags. And then Alice sees that, and she gets really angry
and she, you know, talks to Bob and maybe sues Bob and all that sort of stuff.
Well, how much should Alice be worried about, you know, Bob using that one term "Alice" in the keywords meta tag?
The answer is we don't use the keywords meta tag in our search ranking.
Other search engines might, but Google doesn't.
Now, we do use some meta tags for the Google Search Appliance, so you can specify only return results if they match a
meta tag and things like that.
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 to say we don't use any meta tags. For example, there's one called "meta description."
And oftentimes if you have a good meta description tag, we will use that information or part of that information 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 the
snippet in the search result.
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 someone else is using your name in the keyword meta tags.
It's not really worth suing someone over because at least for Google, we don't use that information in our ranking
even the least little bit.