Google has finally confirmed it. As I wrote in this post, in May, it turns out that meta tag keywords and descriptions are not factors in Google optimization. However, meta tags may still be useful for Yahoo and Bing optimization.
You may also use meta tag descriptions to show in the search results if you are not satisfied with Google’s description of your website.
Update: All the major search engines do not use meta keyword tags, not even Yahoo. Yahoo confirmed it a few months ago. However, meta descriptions may still be used as the displayed description text within SERP results.
They haven’t used the meta keywords for a long time, however your post is a dangerous one because you imply that they don’t utilise the meta tag description at all. They may not use it in the ranking algorithm, but they definitely use it in the SERPs.
The meta tag description becomes the description for each indexed page of your site. I use unique meta tag descriptions for each page to describe what that page does, this shows up in the SERPs pages. Neglecting that meta data would be one of the biggest mistakes a site owner could make.
From the link you have provided they suggest that they “sometimes” use the tag for snippets. I’ve found that they use it about 99% of the time. There are very few pages where I’ve used unique meta data where they haven’t used the description.
Dan,
I did mention that in the last sentence. However, I probably could’ve worded it better.
Thanks for clarifying anyways.