Google has announced that it no longer supports the meta news keywords tag, a change that has been in effect for several months.
This was confirmed when Joost de Valk of Yoast inquired with Google’s John Mueller regarding the status of the meta news keywords tag, prompting an official response.
John Mueller responded on Twitter, acknowledging that support for the tag was dropped around the same time it was removed from the help center. He clarified that while keeping the tag on pages is not harmful, it is no longer utilized by Google News.
The fact that this change is only now being noticed might reflect the low usage of the tag by site owners on their news articles. The poor adoption rate could be a reason for discontinuing support, although Google has not provided a specific explanation for this decision.
Maintaining the tag on news articles causes no issues, as Google will simply disregard it in the same way it does with the regular meta keywords tag. If you currently have the tag in place, there is no need to be concerned, just avoid adding it to any new articles.
