The meta keywords tag — <meta name="keywords" content="..."> — is one of the most persistent pieces of outdated SEO advice still floating around. Here's the actual history and what to do instead.
What happened to it
Google confirmed back in 2009 that it does not use the meta keywords tag in its ranking algorithm at all — it had been abused too heavily by sites stuffing it with irrelevant terms to game rankings, so it stopped carrying any signal. Bing has said essentially the same thing. Neither major search engine reads it today.
So why do some tools still generate it?
Mostly inertia and completeness — some CMS themes and older SEO plugins still include a keywords field because it was standard for years, and some site owners assume "more metadata can't hurt." It genuinely does nothing for rankings either way, positive or negative, in modern search engines.
What to focus on instead
The tags that do matter: your title tag and meta description (what actually appears in search results and drives click-through), your heading structure (H1/H2 hierarchy), and structured data (schema markup) where relevant. A free meta tag generator covers exactly these — title, description, Open Graph and Twitter Card tags — and deliberately leaves out the keywords tag, since including it would be adding dead weight to your page's source.
The bottom line
You can safely remove the meta keywords tag from your pages if it's there, or skip adding it if you're building new pages — it has had zero effect on Google or Bing rankings for over a decade.
Try it yourself
Put this into practice with our meta tag generator.