Yahoo still indexes META keywords. The ranking boost, however, is marginal. META keywords are useful for targetting low hanging fruits, though ineffective when optimizing for competitive terms, because off-page factors in that case would overshadow any on-page factors, especially factors like META keywords tag or HTML comments that are invisible to surfers and are prone to spam attempts.
There's a powerful on-page factor you can use to nail a #1 position on Google for mildly competitive terms. Hint: it's not the META keyword tag.
A few words from Google:
Quote:
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Next we have two name values: keywords, which these days is mostly useless, ironically, and description, which is still somewhat useful.
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http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/metadata.html
The fact Google ignores META keywords is easy to test, though if you think you have examples that prove otherwise I'd love to see it.
META keywords is good for one thing. It's a great substitute for ICRA tags. Google uses words it finds in the META keywords tag to detect pages with adult images.