Do search engines index the keywords meta tag?

This test will seek to determine if search engines index the keywords meta tag.

The keywords meta tag was designed for webmasters to inform search engines what a web page was about.

Google states that they do not use the keywords meta tag.

Yahoo states that they do use the keywords meta tag.

Here is an example keywords meta tag:

<meta name="keywords" content="keywords meta tag">

Testing Methodology

This page contains a keywords meta tag. This meta tag can be seen if you view the source code to this web page.

Evaluation Methodology

View the source code to this web page to view the keywords meta tag.

Search for the unique string from the keywords meta tag in these search engines.

Search Engine	Expected Result
Google	No
Yahoo	Yes
MSN	Unknown
AltaVista	Unknown
AllTheWeb	Unknown

If this page shows up in the search results, then that search engine most likely indexes the keywords meta tag.

Caveats

This page was put online on 22 April, 2004. It will take some time for each search engine to crawl and index this page to make this test "live."

A malicious person could link to this page using the unique string in the keywords meta tag as link text. This would force a false positive on most search engines and invalidate the test results.

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