Meta keywords tag present: should you remove it?

What it means

The page contains a <meta name="keywords"> tag — a tag Google officially stopped reading in September 2009 and has ignored ever since. It has no effect on Google, Bing or Yahoo rankings.

Why it matters

The tag does no direct harm, but flagging it matters for two practical reasons. First, it signals template debt: meta keywords on a live site usually means a CMS theme, plugin or build script predating 2010 that has never been reviewed, and that same template often carries other outdated patterns worth auditing. Second, it exposes your keyword strategy — the tag is visible in page source, so competitors and scrapers can read exactly which terms you target without doing any research. This is unnecessary information leakage that modern SEO avoids by default.

How to fix it

1. Remove the <meta name="keywords"> line from the HTML template.
2. If the CMS generates it, disable the setting or delete the template partial that outputs it (Yoast and Rank Math do not emit it by default).
3. For static site generators, grep the templates — grep -r 'name="keywords"' ./templates/ — and delete every match.
4. There is no scenario where removing the tag causes a ranking drop; it carries no weight.

When it's not a problem

If the site runs an internal search engine that genuinely uses the tag for category matching, preserving it is reasonable — document the decision. For public pages indexed by Google the tag is always unnecessary; the only question is whether cleanup is worth the time relative to higher-priority issues. This is a notice, not an emergency.

How common is it?

3195 audited sites in our corpus currently show this issue. The breakdowns below show which platforms, gatekeepers, verticals and countries are most exposed.