"Bring back the meta keywords tag — it can't hurt."

"Bring back the meta keywords tag — it can't hurt."

It hurt.

A reseller agency talked a client into adding meta keywords tags to 5,000 pages, packed with every term they wanted to rank for. Harmless ritual, they said. Google ignores it for ranking — which is true.

But a competitor scraped those tags (they're right there in the HTML) and got a free, complete map of the client's entire keyword strategy and target list. Within a quarter, the competitor had published targeted pages against the 30 highest-value terms and taken share on 11 of them.

Google ignores meta keywords. Your competitors don't. You handed them your strategy document in the page source, for nothing, because a 2003 best-practice zombie wouldn't die.

The tag's ranking value is zero. Its intelligence value to whoever reads your source is not. Leave it dead. (The one measurable outcome of adding it was helping someone else.)