Google ignored meta keywords in 2009—your SEO plugin didn't notice
The February sun slants through your office window, catching dust motes above your keyboard. You’re auditing your site’s SEO settings for the first time in months, and there it is: a field labelled “meta keywords,” waiting to be filled. You pause. Didn’t Google stop reading this years ago?
Why your WordPress SEO plugin still asks for meta keywords seventeen years later
Google stopped indexing the meta keywords tag in 2009, yet nearly every SEO tool includes it.
Google announced in September 2009 that it would ignore the meta keywords tag entirely. Bing followed suit. Yandex never cared. By 2010, the tag was officially dead for search ranking purposes. Yet in 2026, Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO, Shopify’s theme editors, Squarespace’s advanced settings, and dozens of smaller plugins still offer a dedicated field for meta keywords. Some even validate your entries and warn you when you exceed a character count that hasn’t mattered since the Bush administration.
The reason isn’t technical debt or developer laziness—it’s user expectation and competitive feature parity. SEO plugin developers report that removing the meta keywords field generates support tickets and negative reviews from users who believe they need it. When Plugin A drops the field and Plugin B keeps it, a non-trivial number of users interpret Plugin B as “more complete” or “more professional,” regardless of whether the field does anything. The same dynamic plays out in theme marketplaces: a Shopify theme with twenty SEO fields outsells one with fifteen, even when five of those fields connect to nothing.
There’s a secondary reason: a handful of niche search engines and directory sites still parse meta keywords, and some enterprise content management systems use the tag for internal taxonomy or site search. For most operators running a newsletter, blog, or small e-commerce site, those use cases don’t apply—but plugin developers build for the widest possible audience, and “widest possible” includes the edge cases. The result is a field that persists in every interface, trains new operators to fill it out, and quietly drains time that could go toward writing better titles or earning backlinks.
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