Penalty for metakeywords not being in the body

[Gnolen]

Hi there,

I just love reading through the posts here and now it is time to ask a question myself..

I am wondering if you know if I have keywords in my META keyword tag and some of these words doesn't show up in the body anywhere, could I then get penalized for this by Yahoo? I heard something about it before but I am not sure..Is there a list(or ideas) on what Yahoo give penalites for nowadays?

Thankful for any help and ideas..

/ Gnolen

[rustybrick]

Are these keywords completely off topic? If not, I wouldn't worry.

They do not have to match the words you use on the page.

[seo-ireland]

As long as they are on-topic it should be ok. For example an intelligent search engine should be able to determine that the keyphrase "britney spears" would be fishy on a page containing just a Christmas pudding recipe.

[jadibones]

I wonder if you got that idea from IBP 8.

I own it and it pretty much tells you not to use keywords in the meta tags if you don't use them in the body text. It warns against it as if there will be some kind of penalty, but I totally agree with rustybrick. Just don't go nuts, don't stuff, and stay relevent. You should be okay.

[Gnolen]

Thanks guys,

I do not know where I read it somewhere but I remember it was from a trusted source and actually it was for Google.

The reason I asked it is that I have to look in every alley to find an answer why our site have pretty heavy penalties at Yahoo. We are not banned though because we have a couple of thousands of pages indexed but we are not showing up at all (if I do not look way, way back on the result) in the organic searches. But for Google we are on top on almost everything (and it is in a pretty competitive market).

Frustrating never the less..

/ Gnolen

[sufyaaan]

Thanks guys,

I do not know where I read it somewhere but I remember it was from a trusted source and actually it was for Google.

The reason I asked it is that I have to look in every alley to find an answer why our site have pretty heavy penalties at Yahoo. We are not banned though because we have a couple of thousands of pages indexed but we are not showing up at all (if I do not look way, way back on the result) in the organic searches. But for Google we are on top on almost everything (and it is in a pretty competitive market).

Frustrating never the less..

/ Gnolen
As far as I know, the best way to use meta Keywords tag is to place your page keywords, their synonyms and their misspellings.

Although the max. limit is 1000 characters, it is believed that anything over 256 characters is ignored by all major SEs.

Its importance in terms of Google optimization is one of the most controversial topics in SEO. IMO, however, it might be less effective for G as compared to Yahoo and MSN. But it would be unwise to wholly discard it.

Further, I don't see why anyone would place a rather unrelated keyword(s) in this tag to trick SEs. I think those days of keywords stuffing and seeing any better rankings are gone a long time ago.