Worth removing keywords...?
-
I was just going over a site I manage and noticed it had a load of meta keywords on it. Probably 10-15 keywords per page... Do you think this is harming the site? Is it worth removing them?
-
I read somewhere that the meta keywords did matter for some search engines still like Yahoo but not for Google. Not sure where I read it...maybe I am mistaken though.
-
Added to Davinias thoughts, it also is a quick way for competitors to find out what you are trying to rank for - it's the first thing I look for on a competitors website!
-
There is no SEO benefit in using meta keywords, however if you do use them and are keyword spamming (i.e. using more than 2-3 page specific terms) then you could be penalized.
I always recommend removing the tag completely from the website as it stops the client from spamming the tag at a later date and it reduces the amount of 'useless' code in the source code (Google likes a website that loads quickly!)
-
See that's what I thought... It's not the worlds biggest job to remove the keywords but just wondered on pro's and con's of doing it...
-
"As far as I know."
-
Whats AFAIK? (Sorry not down with the lingo!)
-
AFAIK, it's not harming the site because the search engines don't even look at the meta-keywords tag. Stuff it, leave it empty, whatever.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Keyword cannibalization
Hi, I have two questions regarding keyword cannibalization. 1. I am doing the SEO for a website that sells do-it-yourself packages for heating, bathrooms, ventilation and so on for new houses or for renovations. The most important pages are the product pages (e.g. example.com/products/bathrooms) but there is also a blog divided into categories per product (e.g. example.com/category/bathrooms). The difference is clear: the product page focuses on the product itself, and the blog category page contains all blog posts relating bathrooms (tips, new materials, new innovations,...). My question is if the product page and blog category page can compete with each other for the term bathrooms (although they have different content). Does it help or is it enough to direct internal links from separate blog posts to the most important page (being the product page) and back to avoid my category blog page to compete with my product page? Another possibility would be to use a canonical tag on the category page pointing to the product page, but this actually isn't good practice because it isn't really duplicate content. Third possibility would be to no index the category page. So what is the best solution of the three? 2. A second example of keyword cannibalization can be category archive pages for webshops. If you have a category page example.com/jeans and a subcategory page example.com/jeans/women, is it useful to optimize on both pages for different terms, being jeans for the first page and jeans for women for the second, or will Google not make this distinction because the keyword are too closely related? In other words, is it useful to write content specifically for jeans for women and make a landing page for this keyword, or will this page compete with the category page that has been optimized for just the keyword jeans? In large clothing webshops, you can see for example that there is an optimized page for Nike (content, headings,...) but not for Nike for women or Nike for men. Is this just laziness or is this done exactly to avoid keyword cannibalization? Looking forward to your comments!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Impact of Removing 60,000 Page from Sites
We currently have a database of content across about 100 sites. All of this content is exactly the same on all of them, and it is also found all over the internet in other places. So it's not unique at all and it brings in almost no organic traffic. I want to remove this bloat from our sites. Problem is that this database accounts for almost 60,000 pages on each site and it is all currently indexed. I'm a little bit worried that flat out dumping all of this data at once is going to cause Google to wonder what in the world we are doing and we are going to see some issues from it (at least in the short run). My thought now is to remove this content in stages so it doesn't all get dropped at once. But would deindexing all of this content first be better? That way Google would still be able to crawl it and understand that it is not relevant user content and therefore minimize impact when we do terminate it completely? Any other ideas for minimizing SEO issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens1 -
How to rank same page for multiple related keywords
We need some of our pages to rank for multiple related keywords. But we cannot optimise one page for multiple keywords which might end up ranking for none of them; at the same time we cannot optimise it for one keyword as we ignore other keywords. I think creating multiple landing pages for very related keywords will confuse users and search engines as well. How to handle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Spammy keywords in our sub-domain but no penalty?
Hi, We have cigarettes and viagra as keywords in our sub-domain where our clients can post their business content. We have decent number of impressions and clicks for these related keywords. I have seen that these two words, especially "viagra" is most spammed. So are these hurting us? We dropped post Penguin update. Any correlation? Do you think that these keywords penalise us? We don't have messages or suggestion from Google Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Correct strategy for long-tail keywords?
Hi, We are selling log houses on our website. Every log house is listed as a "product", and this "product" consists of many separate parts, that are technically also products. For example a log house product consists of doors, windows, roof - and all these parts are technically also products, having their own content pages. The question is - Should we let google index these detail pages, or should we list them as noindex? These pages have no content, only the headline, which are great for long-tail SEO. We are probably the only manufacturer in the world who has a separate page for "log house wood beam 400x400mm". But otherwise these pages are empty. My question is - what should we do? Should we let google index them all (we have over 3600 of them) and maybe try to insert an automatic FAQ section to every one of them to put more content on the page? Or will 3600 low-content pages hurt our rankings? Otherwise we are ranking quite well. Thanks, Johan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohanMattisson0 -
Should we get a new domain that has our main keyword in it.
We have been running our site about 10 years under the domain www.islesurfboards.com and we are referred as "Isle Surfboards" when linked to in the anchor text. Our core product line and keyword focus has always been on "surfboards" and its related long tail keywords. However in the last several years we have began to sell "paddle boards" and now they have become our best selling product accouting for 80% of our business. We really want to rank well for "paddleboards" and related words but noticed we always seem to fall below people who have websites with "paddleboard" or "sup" in the domain and company name. will they always rank better unless we also inlcude it in ours? Should we move to a New Domain that focuses on the new target keyword "paddleboard" or a combo of both "surfboards" and "paddleboards"and would this make any difference or even hurt us since it would be a new domain. Then in addition rebrand our company name to include surfboards and/or paddleboards in the company name or some combo of both so the anchor text when people who refer to us relate to both paddle boards and surfboards?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
Should I Decrease My Keyword Density
On SEOmoz's On-page tool it is telling me that I should cut the number of phrases for a specific key phrase almost in half, from 27 to 15. However my keyword density for this page is only 1.68%. I would have thought that was a good keyword density to have, if not even a little higher. Should I trust the tool and decrease this keyword phrase? Would love to hear from anyone with experience in this. If you want to see the page it is http://www.mybluedish.com/. The key phrase is "satellite internet"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0 -
Remove www. in google webmaster
Hi. My baseball blog (mopupduty.com) shows up as www.mopupduty.com in Google Webmaster tools. This is an issue for me, as my Wordpress plug-in sitemap will only show up on http://mopupduty.com/sitemap.xml , not the www. version Is there any way in changing the www. in webmaster tools without deleting my existing index. The website currently has sitelinks in search results, and I'm not too keen in giving them up via deletion. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mkoster0