A list of meta tags which are not being used by search engines

First of all, there is nothing wrong about including the following meta tags - it would not hurt your SEO if you do. However, if you're interested in SEO, it's always valuable to stay up to date and to know which meta tags you should stop using for your website in order to keep the head tag short and tidy.

The following meta tags have little to no value since they are not being used anymore by Google and other search engines. Instead, they can take precious mental space to keep up to date. For example, if you still use the keywords meta tag, you'd probably need to add keywords for each blog article you write. You could instead spend more time making the content better!

Keywords meta tag

<meta name=”keywords” content="shoe, shoes, shoee, shos, footwear" />

A lot of SEO and content people might find this surprising, but the keywords meta tags haven't been used by Google since at least 2009 (but in reality, probably much earlier than that). Nowadays, it's completely safe to drop this from your SEO strategy.

Revisit-after meta tag

<meta name="revisit-after" content="4 days">

This hasn't been used for a long time. Instead, Google uses the sitemap to determine freshness of the page. Google will also periodically crawl the webpage and check for new updates.

Redirect meta tag

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="60">

W3C are not a fan of the Redirect meta tag and strongly encourages against it. If you need to redirect to a new page, you should just use a 301 server side redirect.

Geo meta tags

<meta name="geo.placename" content="United Kingdom" />
<meta name="geo.position" content="x;x" />
<meta name="geo.region" content="uk" />
<meta name="ICBM" content="x,x" />

It looks like Google has been ignoring these meta tags for a long time. Bing seems that continued using them until recently, according to this more recent article which indicates that Bing has also made these meta tags obsolete, so you should consider using other strategies to tell search engines where you are located.

If you'd like to indicate where you business is located, you can do that by using your content, Structured Data, hreflang or your ccTLDs.

Abstract meta tag

<meta name="abstract" content="summary of the page's content">

A less known meta tag, and for good reason. Search engines haven't recognised this meta tag for a long time and instead they prefer to use the beloved description tag.

We haven't included any of these meta tags when building our SEO components templates which are accessible via our PRO dashboard - we like to keep to keep up to date with the trends. :)