Another Keywords Question

[chesa7]

Still on the subject of Meta Tag Keywords, is it necessary to repeat rhw "root" keyword with various descriptors?

For example: "gift baskets, chocolate gift baskets, spa gift baskets, gourmet gift baskets," or do the serach engines only need to see the root word once, such as "gift baskets, chocolate, spa, gourmet"

what do you advise?

Laura

[RayGoneFishing]

Repeating the same words over and over looks kinda spammy. I'd definitely go with the second version. Even though search engines don't pay much attention to the meta keyword tag nowadays, the excessive repetitions might still raise a red flag.

[torka]

Google doesn't even index the keywords meta tag at all. Put whatever you want in there.

We've already spent more time in this thread discussing this tag than it's worth.

--Torka

[RayGoneFishing]

Originally Posted by torka

Google doesn't even index the keywords meta tag at all. Put whatever you want in there.

Sure, Google doesn't index the keywords, but that doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't look at them. Consider this: If the keywords tag is useless but appears on the page anyway, and contains multiple repetitions of the same word/words, wouldn't Google be foolish to ignore such an obvious hint that the page was (over-)optimized?

By itself it's probably harmless, but if other borderline "optimization" techniques were also used on the page, couldn't the stuffed keywords tag contribute to pushing the page past some kind of threshold that triggers a spam alert or penalty?

I don't know if Google really does this, but if it does, it would mean that a bad keywords tag could in fact hurt your ranking, even though a good one can't improve it.

What do you think? Possible?

[tobias77]

No, you don't need to repeat such words, use them once only. And if they are important, use them at the beginning at the keyword list.

While Google does not take much advantage from the keywords tag (but no one knows this for sure, since Google as most other search engines are hiding their rating schemes for good reasons), I always find it important to have it - even just for my personal usage to get remembered during website development, which keywords are important and must get used in the page content frequently.

[seg_cost]

Even my suggestion is also no to repeat same keyword

[TuffyAle]

Its not necessary.Google goes by viewer interaction with your site
to rank it well. How often people visit it, repeat visits etc.

A page that has all the correct keywords but poor viewer experience
will not rank well..

[Logan]

Google goes by viewer interaction with your site to rank it well. How often people visit it, repeat visits etc.

That is way off from my experiences and what I know about Google. Where are you getting this information from?