Confirmed by Google, there is a new feature being tested for search results. In the snippet section of a Google search there is a new portion that shows ‘tags‘ within it.
When trying to click on this portion it offered no functionality or linked anywhere, so what is the reason they are even there? That, Google did not spill to journalists. Essentially all it seems to be as of now is a list of relevant ‘tags’ to the searched content within the snippet that is presented.
There is no ability to filter the tags, or click on them at all. Basically just relevant keywords that were included in the article. Google has confirmed this with searchengineland, as an ‘experiment’ as of now but did not go into much detail about their purpose or why they were even there.
While we haven’t come across this in any of our searches recently there have been reports around other SEO blogs that webmasters have been running into this ‘experiment’ from time to time.
Is it possible that they are implementing a once defunct meta keyword tag feature on to snippets? Only time will tell and until we hear anything concrete from Google we can only guess.