Do meta keywords matter?

No, meta keywords don't matter for SEO purposes anymore, and this has been confirmed directly by Google, which stated clearly back in 2009 that it does not use the meta keywords tag as a ranking factor in any way, and this remains true today. Other major search engines like Bing have made similar statements, either ignoring the tag entirely or giving it such minimal consideration that it has no meaningful practical impact on where your pages rank. This shift happened largely because the meta keywords tag became heavily abused in the early days of SEO, with websites stuffing it full of irrelevant, excessive, or even competitor brand names purely to try to game search rankings, which ultimately made the tag useless as a reliable signal of actual page relevance. While meta keywords themselves don't matter, it's important not to confuse this with meta titles and meta descriptions, which absolutely do matter, not as direct ranking factors necessarily, but because they significantly influence whether someone clicks on your listing in search results, which indirectly affects your overall search performance and traffic. If your website still has meta keywords tags from years past, there's no urgent need to remove them since they cause no harm, but adding new ones is simply wasted effort.