SEO experts have long debated the importance of the meta keyword tag. Does it affect rank? If so, how heavily is it weighted? Does it do anything at all?

Though many people suspected for a while that meta keywords were doing little to affect search rank, some recent announcements from both Google and Yahoo! finally confirm on the record that the tag is no longer crawled by the search engines or considered in rank.

Matt Cutts cleared up any confusion about Google's take on meta keywords in a video posted to his blog on September 21 in which he clearly states the search engine does not pay attention to the meta keyword tag and has not for quite a while.

Just yesterday Yahoo! announced at SMX East in New York that they no longer support meta keyword tags either.

So does having meta keywords hurt you? The jury is still out. Most people say leaving the keywords in will not have an adverse affect on your site. However, it does make your keyword strategy available to any competitor that chooses to check your meta data.