Yes, in fact they have not been relied upon since many years. An
article from Danny Sullivan stating exactly this was released in October 2002.
There are still some minor “stone age” search engines around that uses them.
The main reasons why they have been ceased to work are mostly from these factors:
- Most webmasters tried to fool the search engines with meta tags unrelated to their content and services.
- With improved FTS (full text search) tool kits from verity and many other companies, search engines can index your web pages and know the theme of your web page. With such advanced APIs, search engines like google can easily decide, what your website is about and what your website offers.
Some of the basic features of FTS API are that they can filter out text of your webpage and get important statistics such as:
- How many times a word gets repeated
- How far each repeated words are from each other
- How many times a particular word gets repeated in a particular sentence
- How far a word 'Online' appears from words like 'Party', 'invitations' to
see if that sentence makes any sense.
- They can easily figure out, if you are doing keyword dumping.
So with such API's the webmaster should concentrate on the content/layout and not put the meta tags as a main concern.
However it has been tested that the meta keyword tag still has a minor influence on the rankings and the meta description tag should be used as it is some times shown in the SERPs (search engine result pages).
