Google has finally officially confirmed what the SEO community has known for years: it “disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking”. So, don’t waste any more time on them and don’t be impressed by anyone who suggests they matter (including would-be plaintiffs).
Meta descriptions, on the other hand, do matter. They don’t affect ranking, but they are in certain circumstances used as the default text for search results snippets and they will thus affect the chance of a click-through. So, it will pay to craft concise, fact-laden meta descriptions specific to each page.
