Keyword and description metatag test

This post is a simple test of the effect of keyword and description metatags.

Once upon a time keyword and description metatags where the be-all and end-all of SEO. Obviously times have changed and, having read many reports about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of these antiquated devices, we decided to run our own little experiment.

This page contains two words in the meta tags that do not appear anywhere in any of the search engines we tested. We have one particular word in the description metatag, and a different word in the keyword metata so we may test the effects of both.

Obviously, we cannot write these words here because search engines would be all over them in a trice! If you are interested, please feel free to check the source code of this page.

Update. A few months after posting this item, it turns out that Google has not indexed this particular page based on these particular words. However, it looks like the words under test have cropped up on other web pages recently, so if you do search for them you will start getting results now, however you still should not get results that include this particular page; consequently I still won't be posting the words in the content of this page as it will unbalance the results.

Our results are as follows:

1. Google has not indexed this page
2. Yahoo has indexed this page
3. MSN has not indexed this page
4. AOL has not indexed this page
5. ASK has not indexed this page

So it would appear that Yahoo is the standalone relic from a bygone age, being the only big-hitter that still indexes according to meta keywords and meta descriptions.