: Is it ok to use HTML comment in order to remove a meta directive? I am working on this new site, and the original creator used meta keywords. I want to remove them but for various reasons

@Nimeshi995

You should be fine.

Stating the obvious, the fetch from any spider will still get your entire HTML code. Google, and I am sure Bing and others, will still store the entire HTML in their database. But that is where it will/should end.

Search engines use the HTML DOM object model to analyze your source code. Google, Bing, and others with the exception of Yandex, will completely ignore any keywords meta-tag found. In fact, there is no provision within the Google index for the keywords meta-tag and has not been for a very long time. That is good news. So even without the comment tags, only Yandex would even touch the keywords meta-tag.

To further your point, I have done the same thing as a quick fix to modify the HTML my site produces with positive and immediate (as much as search allows) effect. You should be fine using the comment tags to disable (lack of a better word) the keywords meta-tag. I rather suspect that even with Yandex, this will work a treat!

Not a worry. You are doing the right thing!

If and when you can remove the keywords meta-tag, I would recommend it. I know that sometimes this is not an easy thing to do. But put it on your to-do list after all the other really important items and get to it as soon as you can. Think about how nicer the holidays will be without that damned keywords meta-tag hanging over your head? The wine would be sweeter, the meal spectacular, the company a charm, the music more soothing, the night air and evening stars will be magical, and your girl will be the belle of the ball... okay, I might have gone over-board. But you get my drift.

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@Looi9037786

You shouldn't delete or disable them. If Google doesn't takes keywords into account, it doesn't mean, they are on any way dangerous or would on any way disturb your site's ranking:)

I would let them published. Specially, if they aren't spammy, but descriptive.

Keywords could help you to istablish a relation between your site and the topics described by meta keywords on the way you can't imagine: look, there are gazillions of web crawlers in the wild web. They all crawl the web with gazillions of different parameters. One of these parameters is keywords. In example, a web crawler (not a Googlebot, but anythings built up from a Chinese or russian schoolboy) crawls all sites, which have meta keywords, and builds an indexable web database from them, which is enriched by structured data. Google finds this database and finds a citation of your site url associated with its keywords. On this way your site becomes an indexed relation to the keywords, even if Google doesn't directly takes them into account.

If your site is a Google News publisher, so there is a kind of keywords, which indeed are taken by Google into account, namely news_keywords - in this case you could rework keywords into news_keywords.

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