Google Have Announced A Meta Keywords Tag For News Articles

Well, after a long (sort of) absence Meta Keywords are back! Not technically speaking however, the original meta keywords tag has died a long painful death in the SEO industry.

Nope, these meta keyword tags are completely new news_keywords metatag which Google have just announced and it will only work for news publishers that are sources within Google News. This new metatag will give those publishers out there the freedom and creativity to do whatever they want when it comes to titles, they will no longer have to worry about cramming the keywords into the title. Below you can see a quick explanation from the Google News Product Manager Rudy Galfi:

“The goal is simple: empower news writers to express their stories freely while helping Google News to properly understand and classify that content so that it’s discoverable by our wide audience of users.”

“Similar in spirit to the plain keywords metatag, the news_keywords metatag lets publishers specify a collection of terms that apply to a news article. These words don’t need to appear anywhere within the headline or body text.”

Google have already created and published a help page which will show you how to implement the news_keywords meta tag, which looks something like this:

“meta name=”news_keywords” content=”World Cup, Brazil 2014, Spain vs Netherlands”

Publishers are now limited to using only 10 news keywords and to use them each one has to separated by a comma.

Google have also warned ,however, that using these news_keywords meta tag is by no means a quick path to ranking higher within Google News. After all this is only one signal, and “high-quality reporting and interesting news content remain the strongest ways to put your newsroom’s work in front of the Google News users.”

For example, should you be running a “news” site called Kenny’s Tech Dump that no one out there has ever heard of it contains low-quality content, the news_keywords tag isn’t going to help your iPhone 5 review outrank an article by Walt Mossberg or by the Wall Street Journal. I’m sorry about that though.