Keywords meta tag is no longer used by search engines

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Nick Thorley: Hopefully a quick question for you all. The keywords meta tag is no longer used by search engines but many still add keywords to it for site management purposes (so the editors of the site know what keywords each page is trying to target so they are aware when editing / writing content). My question is - do the search engines penalise you for this as its widely known that the tag is no longer used ie they see you as a spammer or do they simply ignore the tag and its contents so it has no effect - positive or negative.
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  Suraj Gadage: +Nick Thorley ;Meta keywords no longer have the power to offer you a privileged position in search engine results. Those who choose to implement spammy SEO tactics built around keyword Meta tags could expose themselves to penalties. However, in all likelihood penalty requires a mixture of several different signals, or going truly overboard in one area.
  
  Hope this helps!
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  Nick Thorley: +Suraj Gadage ;thanks - so you dont think relevant keywords added to the keywords tag would result in a penalty. I was aware they would have no benefit but was just keen to avoid a penalty for an operational need.
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  Suraj Gadage: +Nick Thorley ; Yes. We should ensure we don't overdo it though.
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  Neeraj Pandey: +Nick Thorley usually using keyword meta doesn't lead you to any penalty. As far as I know Google completely ignores it and Bing does see it like spammy but I didn't get any update if Bing penalizes you for this that's why as Google is giant in se people use this keeping in mind that Google will ignore it... It is true that it helps you have a note of what keywords you are targeting to which page but with this it has 1 drawback too. It gives a great insight to your competitors about what type of keywords he should target so I would say that it's not good to have keyword in page rather try to have some excel with target keyword and their respective page
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  Justin Van Daele: I'm a newbie and learning seo for my wp blog. My question is that I use tags to organize on my blog.. Like a sub category. Are these meta tags?
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  Tim Capper: I am sure I read somewhere that Google once said that, although we do not use meta keywords, we can use it as a spam indicator.
  
  So i would say, if you are using them to focus your understanding of a page for editors, then not to more then 3 for example.
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  Chase Reiner: +Suraj Gadage ;Do you think Google reads the keywords tag in Schema article markup?
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  Suraj Gadage: +Chase Reiner ;Yes I think so. Also, this property is widely used. According to Schema.org usage is between 250,000 and 500,000 domains.
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  Jim Munro: From the expert panel in this week's SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:03:34 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/keywords_meta_tag_is_no_longer_used_by_search_engines +Nick Thorley
  
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