Google says the “keywords” meta tag doesn’t affect its search rankings

Web developers will be “delighted” knowing that the time they spent optimizing the keywords meta tag won’t affect the ranking of their pages on the Google search engine even the least little bit.
In a surprising revelation slipped into a blog post, the search giant has finally come clean on a matter that has been torturing developers for years, confirming that the Google search engine does not use the “keywords” meta tag in ranking the web search results. Only the Google Search Appliance box specifically sources, among others, the keywords meta tag and only if you specifically match search results against the supported meta tags.
The consumer Google search engine, however, completely disregards any information that’s embedded in HTML pages via the keywords meta tag. The search giant has vividly illustrated this with the following example:

Suppose you have two website owners, Alice and Bob. Alice runs a company called AliceCo and Bob runs BobCo. One day while looking at Bob’s site, Alice notices that Bob has copied some of the words that she uses in her “keywords” meta tag. Even more interesting, Bob has added the words “AliceCo” to his “keywords” meta tag. Should Alice be concerned? At least for Google’s web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is no. Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking.

Google has finally confirmed that it does not use the "keywords" meta tag in search ranking, but it may source the search results snippets from the "description" meta tag.

Google wrote it had stopped using the keywords meta tag “many years ago” because it was too often “abused” with irrelevant keywords. The company did stress that its ranking algorithm uses other meta tags, such as the “description” meta tag sourced for search result snippets. To clear up any possible ambiguous interpretation, Google’s software engineer Matt Cutts said the following:

If you’re looking at the keyword meta tags, we really don’t use that at all. So don’t bother to get frustrated if somebody else is using your name in the keyword meta tags - it’s really not worth sueing someone over this. At least for Google, we don’t use that information in our ranking even the least little bit.

Read more at the official Google Webmaster Central blog

Google explains why they’re not using the “keyword” meta tag
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Christian’s Opinion

This news should come as a relief to web developers who have been spending disproportionate amounts of time on choosing the right keywords for the keywords meta tag, hoping this will in some way positively affect their ranking on Google. At least web creators can be positive that they won’t gain (or lose) anything by embedding  meticulously chosen search keywords into HTML pages.
Of course, this is only true for the Google search engine. Other search engines that use different ranking algorithms could rely on the keywords meta tag. On top of that, there’s nothing stopping Google from sourcing the keywords meta tag in the future. Because of all this, developers should not surrender the keywords meta tag but they should stop focusing so much on optimizing the keywords for Google’s main search vehicle. Pity that Google hadn’t cleared this up a few years ago.