Are Meta Tags Necessary?

The latest versions of Wordpress blog software were released without description and keywords meta tags. Wordpress explained their decision to remove meta tags on their development site:

“Some search engines don’t use the meta tag information any more because many people abused it. In fact, meta tags may not represent the content of your site.”  - Meta Tags in Wordpress

We can argue with Wordpress opinion for a long time, it is better to make research to understand importance of meta tags for search engines and rankings. I took dynamic website about classical music called Everynote for testing. Unique thing about this site that webmaster use the same meta keywords and description on every single page. It gave me a chance to find a web page which does not contain words in content which included in meta keywords description.

For research I picked a single page about Ludwig van Beethoven: http://everynote.com/piano.choose/0/2/2/_.note

On Google, Yahoo, Msn, and Ask I typed:

“Everynote Universally considered one of the greatest composers of all times, Ludwig van Beethoven library”

•  Library is the word which included in meta tags but does not appear anywhere in content. Also, the same word “library” does not appear as anchor text in links (backlinks) which point to this page.
• Universally considered one of the greatest composers of all times, Ludwig van Beethoven - first sentence from page content.
• Everynote - domain name

Results:

• Google - 1 position*.
• Yahoo  - 1 position.
• MSN    - page does not appear in search results.
• Ask      - 3 position.

Conclusion: Google, Yahoo and Ask search engines still read meta tags and rank websites if keyword appears in meta keywords / description. MSN search engine does not rank a websites according words and phrases which written in meta keywords / description.

*- Google cache tells that there are links which point to this keyword (library), in reality there are no direct backlinks for page we tested. Also, word library does not appear in any links from Everynote or any other domain name.