Google Drops Support for News Meta Keywords Tag
By Gowdham | February 23, 2018
Google has dropped its support for News Meta Keywords Tag without any announcements. In 2012, Google introduced the News Meta Keywords Tag for the news publishers which is like adding keywords for normal blogs & posts.
As Google didn’t update anything about the Drop of News Meta Keywords, news publishers were still concentrating on that. In recent article by Search Engine Land mentioned that, they were not aware about the Drop of News Meta Keywords Tag and they were using it still now.
In Twitter, Joost de Valk who is the CEO and founder of Yoast has raised a question to John Mueller – Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google.
@dannysullivan @richardgingras In our News SEO plugin, we have an input field for meta news_keywords. We noticed that all documentation on this tag disappeared from your help center.
So the question comes up: are meta news_keywords still supported / useful?
— Joost de Valk (@jdevalk) February 19, 2018
Then it is confirmed by Mueller as, Google Stopped support for News Meta Keywords and it won’t affect the site contains News Meta Keywords. Keeping On Page is good but they won’t consider it for News Blogs is the exact point.
Hi Joost, it looks like we dropped support for this around the time when we removed it from the help center. Keeping it on pages is fine, we just don’t use it for Google News anymore.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) February 20, 2018
As per their tweet, it is confirmed that Google just stopped considering it as a ranking signal and we don’t want to remove the keywords that we used in the past. Also as it is not a ranking signal, we don’t want to use it in future.
Every news publishers were interested in resulting their article in top of Google News to get more visitors & followers as well. So they were very much concentrated in SEO to rank their News Articles. As Google Stops the Support or Not considering it as a ranking signal, then they don’t need to mention the keywords tag in their news article.
Also result of an analysis indicated that only few people were making use of Meta Keywords Tag for news content. So considering it as a ranking signal won’t give you the best results.
On Dec 2012, Article about Google Meta Keyword Tag by Search Engine Land says that only 5% of the News publishers were using the News Meta Keywords Tag.
