ICYMI – Google has confirmed they have dropped the ‘news’ meta keyword tag.
This is something that had been speculated on for a while, but the ever-diligent webmasters continued using it, just in case.
If you are not sure what I am talking about, Google introduced a new meta keyword tag back in 2012 that was designed just for publishers that have news on their site. The goal was to make it easier to identify news within blogs etc.
Well, apparently, Google stopped using it months ago and did not tell any of us.
Now, the ever-reliable source of Google news (even without a meta tag), Twitter, has come through again. Google’s Webmaster Trend Analyst, John Mueller, has confirmed that this is indeed the case.
@dannysullivan @richardgingras In our News SEO plugin, we have an input field for meta news_keywords. We noticed that all documentation on this tag disappeared from your help center.
So the question comes up: are meta news_keywords still supported / useful?
— Joost de Valk (@jdevalk) February 19, 2018
So if you are still using it, you can now stop, there are no consequences, all is right with the world.
