It didn't used to ignore meta keywords but I haven't tested it lately.

The most amusing case of meta keywords in action that I've ever seen was someone had an English web page with Spanish ads on the site.

Turns out they also had a Spanish site and the meta keywords were still in Spanish on the page template they adapted to make the English site.

Not sure if that's what the entire problem was, but it seems if memory serves that changing the meta keywords to English fixed the ads.

So Bill does that mean that the Adsense bot is reading the keywords and does it make sense to to keep them there then?

Bill is saying that the META keywords are read but in my experience they aren't weighted as much as title, headers, etc.--just as you would expect, really.

Are you using the code that AdSense provides that tells the bot to emphasize or ignore sections of the page? You can, for example, place it around navigational sections.

but in my experience they aren't weighted as much as title, headers, etc.

Yep, however I have had a couple of strange experiences with "on page" text recently that made me re-think giving free space to a charity.

There was a UK DEC Disasters Appeal for Indonesia Philippines & Vietnam and all was ok for the first 24 hours and then my index page went crazy showing all sorts of "disaster" type ads and not my widget ads even though I'd only given over space for an image and some text and obviously direct links.

It didn't seem to affect my CTR or earnings however I removed it after a few days but it took a good 48 hours for the ads to return to normal.

I have kept them even though I realize Gbot doesn't include them as a factor anymore. But I recommend that you keep it to 6-10 words. Its pretty hard to see 6 words as stuffing or spamming.

I have kept them even though I realize Gbot doesn't include them as a factor anymore.

Google ignored Meta Tag Keywords even in 2000, where I found this fact out.

Google ignored Meta Tag Keywords even in 2000, where I found this fact out.

There was a time when Meta Description wasn't important either, now Google wants unique descriptions for each page. Just because it isn't important now doesn't mean it won't be in the future. I still include unique keywords on each page I publish, just in case.

You never know with Google.

At one time I developed and hosted graphing, scientific and statistical tools on my site. The page(s) only contained an image of the graph and applet code that executed it. The pages were on my site for over a year until I sold the rights to applets to someone

As I said each applet was hosted on its own page that just had a snapshot and applet tag

I had meta tags for keywords and description and obviously the title tag. The adsense ads on these pages use to serve highly relevant ads. So not sure if it was the Title tag that Adsense bot picked the info from or the other meta tags

One of the ads I liked was one about Andrew Dice Clay on my probability applet page that computed probability of fair and odd DICE thus the ad about the stand up comic