Senior Product Manager Duane Forrester from Bing recently contributed in a Webmaster World forum discussion to say the following regarding the Meta Keyword tag.

I’ll make this statement: meta keywords is a signal. One of roughly a thousand we analyze. Getting it right is a nice perk for us, but won’t rock your world. Abusing meta keywords can hurt you.

How MSN typical is that?

The entire search community is trying to fix the spam while Bing seeks to perpetuate it further. This is NOT 1997 anymore. Even at “one of a thousand signals” it’s a ridiculous statement and signal. So in this page I can say in a proper Meta Keyword Tag that the post is about red tomatoes ( have a look for yourselves =P ) and Bing will actually consider this stupidity which is hidden from normal users?  Really dumb guys!

This from the folks who took 4 years to realize that we use no WWW in our urls…. The forced redirect was literally ignored by Bing for 4 full years and whose own design staff has to use a ton of IE hacks to display their OWN damn pages. So Microsoft just handed all the motivation the spammers need to begin adding a thousand keywords stuffed in the head of their pages and cause us unsurpassed frustration trying to explain to clients that the Meta Keyword tag is NOT going to help them rank… Unbelievable!