It seems that meta tags are no longer worth the paper they are printed on. Google does not actually use the tags that we add to our posts for search.
At a recent event (the video is included below) Matt Cutts who works as a software engineer specialising in search engine optimisation (SEO) at the Search Quality Group in Google, gave this somewhat startling information in response to a question. He said that Google “disregards keyword meta tags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present”. The reason being that they had been abused so extensively is the past. Essentially this means that Google regards tagging as ‘black hat’ (or unethical SEO) irrespective of how responsibly the tagging is done.
Google does however use the meta description (essentially the short summary tag) in some cases to offer a description of the page in the search results but they still don’t use this in the ranking. So as far as Google is concerned the content is what matters (and the headline or the H1 tag as it is known in SEO circles). So for the very first time I am going to add a blog post without meta tags…and hold my breath.
Google’s Matt Cutts
PR and the Social Web 