Can the <meta name="Keywords" tag hurt a website in the search engines?

Question

Can the <meta name="Keywords" tag hurt a website in the search engines? I am creating a new site, and my competitor who is currently #1 in Google does not have a "Keywords" tag, only a title and description. Is the keyword tag needed? Can it hurt?

Answer 1

I have tested the meta keywords on my sites and I got little results due to search engines ignoring them.  These days, you gotta do some work to have people see your pages.

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Answer 2

Google, and other search engines (though some search engine experts say that Yahoo considers it), ignore the keywords tag because it is often used for spamming -- with site owners stuffing keywords event those unrelated to the page

So you have the case of your competitor getting to the #1 spot even without a keywords tag