Hi all!

On June 21, 2018, we launched an experiment regarding the relevance of the META-TAG KEYWORDS in search ranking. A month has passed, and we, as promised, publish the results of the experiment.

The essence of the experiment

For those who are not yet aware of what is happening, we remind you that a month ago (21.06.2018) we launched an an interesting experiment regarding Keywords tag influence in search results. Our task was to find out, after many single cases of significant influence, the relevance of this tag.

We have taken several articles (which articles and other details in this article) from our blog and added several keywords to them in the Keywords tag and left for a month to further identify its impact.

For the purity of the experiment, no one touched these articles for this time and they were not promoted separately.

Now you are aware of what is happening and you can knock out the results.

Results of the experiment with the Keywords tag

A month later, we can sum up the results of this experiment. We want to note that, frankly, we expected more interesting results, and perhaps the reason for this is the time factor, which in SEO plays one of the main roles.

Despite this, we still managed to draw some interesting conclusions.

It is worth noting that throughout the month we have been monitoring the growth dynamics of these key queries.

And here’s what we got:

Slice of positions at the start of the experiment

Slice of positions at the end of the experiment

As we can see, for the request “mining on the site”, a request for the issuance of Yandex.Russia made its way. This partially confirms the influence of this tag in Yandex.

It turned out more mysteriously with the issuance of Google. As you can see in the screenshot, the positions on Google Russia and Google Ukraine have grown, and if we take the query “Where to buy a website”, we also see that this query not only made it to the TOP 100, but also got into the top 20.

This, frankly, confuses us a little, since Google openly states that it does not take into account the Keywords tag and may even downgrade, but the results say otherwise. Of course, it is also worth considering many other factors, including behavioral factors. Unfortunately, only Google itself knows about it.

Omitting the lyrics, let’s look at the dynamics of requests in detail.

We will not paint for each request, but only take interesting ones:

So:

Query for “top monetization services”

Yandex.Russia search results

Google Russia search results

Google Ukraine search results

As we can see, the picture most clearly appeared in Google search results, besides, this experiment shows how quickly the Google search engine catches changes. As for Yandex, the situation is different. The experiment started on 06/21/2018, and on 06/29/2018 the request fell out of the TOP 100, but on 07/06/2018 it returned and rose from 4th position to 2nd and, in fact, remained there until the end of the experiment.

moving on

Queries “how to monetize a site”, “monetize a site”, “earn money on a site”, “how to buy a site”

All of these queries failed to produce any results. They never got into the top 100 in any of the observed listings. There is really one “BUT”. We were interested in the query “how to buy a website” in the Google Russia search results.

This is what we saw:

Dynamics in Google Russia

As we can see, until 07/12/2018 nothing special happened, however, then the request abruptly made its way to position 58, and then on 07/16/2018 it returned back from the TOP 100. Unfortunately, we cannot say what this is connected with but we’ll try to find out. Perhaps this surge was caused by updating the PS algorithms, or maybe other factors influenced this.

Query “mining site”

This is the most dynamic query and the changes were best visible on it

Yandex.Russia search results

Google Russia search results

Google Ukraine SERP dynamics

Here we see growth dynamics everywhere, especially in the issuance of Yandex.

Query “where to buy a site”

Yandex.Russia search results

Despite all the expectations of growth in Yandex for this request, we did not see at least some bursts of his “cardiogram” 🙂 He never came to life, although he may still be ahead.

Dynamics in Google Russia

Google Ukraine SERP dynamics

That’s probably all

META-TAG KEYWORDS. Impact Conclusions

Looking at all this data, it’s worth assuming that keywords does exist, but it doesn’t produce the meaningful results that everyone expects. But here it is worthwhile to understand that we saw more significant results in the search results of Yandex.

As for the Google PS, it’s more an accident than a pattern, and it’s impossible to understand 100% whether such dynamics is connected only with this tag or not, although everything can be.

Taking into account our experience and the projects that we are conducting in SEO, we want to note that you should not focus only on this tag, but you should write high-quality and interesting content, optimize it correctly and properly promote the site without using dubious services, spam databases, directories and other things. .

If you’re having trouble with  With this, you can always contact our team and order the services you need to promote your business. We will be happy to help you get to the TOP.

It is also worth noting that despite the fact that the experiment was primarily aimed at identifying the relevance of the Keywords tag and its impact on search results, we saw how search engines rank queries differently.

Also, given the above statistics, it can be noted that Google Russia search results change more often than Google Ukraine.

We will continue to monitor the dynamics and approximately in a month, with significant changes, we will definitely write a continuation to this article.

We want to thank everyone who followed the experiment and hope it will help you.

If we missed something or you have something to add, we will be glad to all the comments on this article.

And don’t forget to share this article with your friends!

Sincerely, The Top-Bit Team!