Come on, own up, who is actually still indexing the meta keyword tag?

Following my recent article regarding the use of keywords within your SEO strategy, Yahoo followed Google’s example in declaring they too no longer use the Meta keyword tag and in fact have not been doing so for several months.

So that appeared to be that, the black hat’s old favourite was gone for good, or was it?

Upon hearing the news I decided to add an irrelevant keyword tag to the Web Marketing Advisor homepage, just for old times’ sake.

At the time, performing a keyword search for the randomly input string “qazxswedcvfrtgbnhy1111jsahfh” saw no results:

However, at time of writing, the same search sees the site appear in Yahoo’s search listings, but not Google or Bing:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=qazxswedcvfrtgbnhy1111jsahfh

http://www.bing.com/search?q=qazxswedcvfrtgbnhy1111sahfh

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=qazxswedcvfrtgbnhy1111jsahfh

Note, over time, this blog article will appear for that search string, but the home page should only appear in Yahoo searches.

This article isn’t a pop at Yahoo, I’m sure they meant it when they said they no longer supported the tag, perhaps it is being phased out gradually, but for now it’s clear that Yahoo are still indexing and using the meta keyword tag when returning search results.