We went ahead and did this post on the official Google webmaster blog to make it super official, but I wanted to echo the point here as well: Google does not use the keywords meta tag in our web search.
To this day, you still see courts mistakenly believe that meta tags occupy a pivotal role in search rankings. We wanted to debunk that misconception, at least as it regards to Google.
Google uses over two hundred signals in our web search rankings, but the keywords meta tag is not currently one of them, and I don’t believe it will be.
In addition to the official blog post, we made a video as well:
I hope this clarifies that the keywords meta tag is not something that you need to worry about, or at least not in Google.
“Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.”
I find that information a lot more newsworthy then the fact that Google ignores the keyword meta tag.
sandeep, nothing in how we score keyword meta tags has changed in the last few years, so nothing has changed about the ways to rank well on Google.
Joey, we do the videos in a single take. We use the keywords meta tag not at all in our web search ranking. Full stop. If I were doing the video over again, I’d make it even more emphatic. 
Patrick, our web search doesn’t use the keywords meta tag at all. Our enterprise box (Google Search Appliance) can index/return meta tags if you want, but that’s a completely separate product.
Andrew, there’s no harm to using the keywords meta tag other than wasting your time.
Ara Pehlivanian, that’s right.
Rokas, I don’t want the post to sound like an order, because it’s not. I just wanted to clarify Google’s position (that we don’t use the keywords meta tag). Maybe this will help some people avoid getting stressed about things that don’t affect search engines, or at least that’s my hope.
graywolf, meta descriptions don’t count in scoring (that is, determining the scores which are then used to determine what order to show the results in). So changing your meta description tag won’t make your website rank higher. When we show snippets, we can sometimes use the meta description as the snippet that we show. To your point, if two results have the same snippet (not just because of the meta description but in general), we will often show the first result and then the other results are shown if you add “&filter=0″. But the post was about the keywords meta tag and clarifying that we don’t use the keywords meta tag. The reason we mentioned the description meta tag was to make the point that we don’t disregard all meta tags.
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