Is there any limit to the characters we can put in HTML 'keywords' meta tag?

Question

I was wondering if there was a limit, according to the standards, that we should respect while entering keywords in the <meta name="keywords" /> tag inside the HEAD of any HTML page.

Please note, I'm not asking how specific search engines take this tag into consideration, but about standards.

EDIT: modified the title - meant 'keywords', not 'description'

Answer 1

There is no technical limit. You're dependent on the searchbot/searchengine used.

The <meta name="description"> should be the, uh, description of your website which would show up in the search results. The limit is about 150~200 characters.

The <meta name="keywords"> is ignored by the most search bots as they are smart enough to filter the keywords from the actual content. As far only Yahoo uses it (yet). The limit is around 50 words.

Answer 2

There is no limit in the w3c docs. Browsers are free to implement meta data as they choose, however.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4

Answer 3

AFAIK, Google will ignore META tags, and so do them most others. As far as the HTML standard goes, there shouldn't be any limit as such.