Does Yahoo use MetaTags in their search or not?

With the recent announcement by Google that meta tags are no longer a part of their search algorithm the question went to Yahoo. During the "Ask the Search Engine" session at a recent show in New York Yahoo reps indicated that their support of the tags ended several months ago. However, in this same session people were asked if they believed it and most said they did not. This was surprising.

Danny Sullivan, of SearchEngineLand, put this to a test by creating a non-word work like "ssddcceeoeotd" in the meta tag of one of his pages and found that when searched a few days later it did bring up the page where the meta tag was located. Conclusion was they they did indeed support the tags. Subsequently Yahoo sent a message to Mr. Sullivan and indicated that they do use the tags in their search algorithm but it receives the lowest ranking signal in their system. Yahoo says, "Words that appear in any other part of documents, including the body, title, description, anchor text etc., will take priority in ranking the document", the caveat is, "when no other ranking signal is present, unique words that only appear in the meta keyword tag section of documents can still be used to recall these documents.

How does BING figure into all of this? Similarly over at Bing, despite them NOT supporting the tag and never having done so since they launched their own search technology, they do blog much advice about using the tag.

The conclusion? Be wary of what is said about SEO. Be wary of what you might say about SEO. This is as much art as it is science. People speak definitively about it when it is not that definitive. People who discuss what Yahoo does or does not do (even those on the inside) are usually not privy to the search algorithms themselves or would they understand them if they were. Most knowledge has been gained through research and trial and error. Like most organizations, sometimes the left hand may not know what the right hand is doing. Be concerned about content, writing good copy and being relevant to your audience and make a good title tag in the HTML. Then you may choose to consider meta tags with tempered expectations.