I will be interested in reading the responses here....

As in keywords in the page or on the META tags?

And when is this supposed to start?  -Virginia

The way he understands it, it would be: meta name="keywords" content=

Yeah, the question is always what is the secret that google will use to rate sites, but there has been speculation about changes when really people don't fully know what the current formula is. My thought is build a great website that people want to go to and come back to and make sure it's easy to use and that in itself will cause you to do well. I wouldn't worry about changes because they only affect weak sites that put all their eggs in a SEO basket instead of actually haveing a great site that people love.

Check out my new website and tell me what you think. It's still a work in progress. www.TeamQuintana.com Ross Quintana - Team Quintana Real Estate

Spokan Real Estate

You are absolutely right, Ross. No one knows the depth of the algorithm and keywords are all too often seen as a simple Holy Grail in SEO...content, content, GOOD content...

This has been an on and off affair with Google for some time. No reason to panic because it has also been reported that keywords have little effect on ratings anyway. And guess what? That rumor is right! It's the words IN THE CONTENT and in CONTEXT that matter regardless of your meta tag keywords. What matters more than anything is how many sites of relevance there are that link to your page. I love having several blogs!

Ken - Is a link from your blog to your page considered relevant?  -Virginia Hepp

Yes, it's true. If you're talking about keyword META tags. Google does not use keyword META tags in their ranking algorythms.  However, this has been true for years and years... probably over 6 years!  Nothing new here!

The early search engines (before Google), such as Excite, Alta Vista, Web Crawler, etc. used to use the keyword META tag to determine search results.  Very quickly people found out how easy it was to manipulate search results - just by putting your competitor's keywords in your META tags, as well as other things (some people put sexual terms in their keywords, because that was the #1 thing people searched for!).

Then came Google.  They basically IGNORED the keyword META tag and looked at many, many OTHER things, like backlinks, actual keywords on the page, title tags, age of the domain, content, etc. Most of the other search engines now either ignore keyword META tags or they hold very, very little weight, depending on who you talk to. 

It sounds like persistence & time is the key.  Just keep delivering good content consistently, over time.  There are no real shortcuts when it comes to Google.

Yahoo ranking, on the other hand is fairly easy to achieve if you have a quality site and put alot of what you read here on AR into practice.  Unfortunately Google accounts for the lions share of searches.