The total number of keywords is counted and penalties may apply if the count is exceeded.
However the SEO consultants will penalize us if we don't reach the maximum count. At least that is what they try to do in order to sell themselves as a needed commodity.
What happens when the keyword count is exceeded... surely they are not penalized by ignoring all of them? Our test team believes that in usual cases the maximum number of letters will be used and anything exceeding that number simply ignored.
However there is much talk about how Google penalizes and sometimes bans sites that do not comply or exceed their recommendations. If any search engine penalizes a page because it has either too few or too many keywords, instead of simply using a cutoff after the quota, then questions can be asked about the common sense employed by their programmers at the time of their stupidity.
If there is a penalty for repeated keywords in the meta tag for keywords, then why do so many software developers duplicate and even triplicate those keywords when submitting their software to the Addmine directories? Are these developers misinterpreting the SEO guidelines? If they are correct in their assumptions then perhaps we should repeat the main keyword 20 or more times in our meta tags. I think not but it will be interesting to see some of the comments to this article.
