Prestashop: Remove meta keywords from Prestashop - they are deprecated

[PrestaShark]

In Traffic & SEO > SEO & URLs, we need to add an option in the SEO options block to allow the merchant to enable or disable metakeywords fields in every page where this field exists :

• product page
• category page
• cms page
• brands page
• suppliers page

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Initial issue : META keywords are deprecated

So this line of code from /templates/_partials/head.tpl file is useless and potentialy risky.

Source
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
https://datadrivenlabs.io/blog/meta-keyword-tag-google-2018/

Reason?
Not relevant keywords stuffing

[khouloudbelguith]

Hi @PrestaShark,

Thanks for your report.
@eternoendless, @PrestaShop/prestashop-core-developers what do you think?
Thanks!

[Rolige]

I think that this CAN’T be removed yet, the reason, all the SEO softwares (MOZ, SEMrush, etc.) still incorporating it in their ranks and reports.

[PrestaShark]

Hi. Ok this is reason. I found article on SEMrush blog
https://www.semrush.com/blog/the-myths-behind-meta-keywords/

"In essence, nothing. Google ignores them, as does Yahoo. Bing looks at them, but not as a ranking signal. Bing reads the META Keywords tag as a spam signal. If your site uses the tag, but the keywords contained within it do not appear in your document, your site will be penalized."

"Using them potentially creates more harm than good. Close the book on using keyword meta tags."

Second case. Keywords are removed from product SEO tab a long time ago too. What is main purpose to set keywords on other pages?

Shopify removed keywords from both product, main and other pages.
Like here:

view-source:https://debut-demo.myshopify.com/collections/featured-collection-on-home-page/products/key-pouch

view-source:https://debut-demo.myshopify.com/

Its just deprecated. Thats all :)

[Rolige]

I completely agree with you, meta keywords are no longer important to most of search engines, the question is, why are the most important SEO platforms still maintaining this in their analysis?, following this logic, it might be prudent to wait until they disappear completely, because I don’t think that using meta keywords now can affect in a site. That is just my view point!

[matks]

Thank you @Rolige and @PrestaShark for these important informations 😉

Both of you have have brought very relevant items so this issue is tricky 😅

[BilalDr]

Hi everyone and thanks for all those informations.

According to all those element, we all now that Google doesn't use the keywords in meta-keywords and we also know that websites using meta-keywords don't get penalized.

So it could be great to remove them but it's not the priority on SEO for the moment i think.
We will come back on this on a minor version.

[matthieu-rolland]

Hello @marionf, should we still do this ticket given BilalDr's last comment?

[marionf]

@breizoreol Maybe we should ask the opinion of SEO experts to be sure it's not usefull anymore and if it's we need to list all back-office pages where there are meta keywords fields.
@colinegin what do you think ?

[colinegin]

Thanks all for your feedbacks !
After a deeper analysis and a discussion with our SEO expert, we have decided to keep metakeywords as they might be useful in some cases. We are going to provide a new global SEO option to be able to enable or disable metakeywords, so that merchants who don't need it can disable it.

[centoasa]

why do I have the meta name="keywords" content = "bla blabla" in some products present and in others the field is empty? My release is 1.7.6.1
is there a way to edit and / or add keys to the meta keyword?