Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What can I do to stop ranking for a keyword that has nothing to do with the companies website?
-
A website that we maintain keeps ranking for the keyword 'homeless shelter'. The company is UTILIS USA and they produce heavy duty shelters for military personnel. They have nothing to do with homeless shelters but continue to receive traffic concerning the phrase.
-
What do you call a porn-addicted Mozzer? A person with a lot of link juice.
Yeah, I heard Moz gets a lot of porn traffic. I also heard they get a lot of unauthorized backdoor entries.
Something something DDOS attack. Something something too many partners.
I'll be here all week, or until Moz bans me.
I'm sorry. I'll go back to spreadsheets.
-
Do you have the word homeless anywhere on your site? or even home?
-
I love the 'marketing angle' spin to this whole thing for the shelter structures. !! Great idea.
-
Addendum - I think I found the connection. I searched a combo of brand and keyword "utilis usa homeless shelter" and found these lovely results on page 1 in Google
https://www.chamberofcommerce.com/fort-walton-beach-fl/1158721-utilis-usa
http://www.hellodestin.com/local-businesses/utilis_usa/601399199/
http://www.citysearch.com/profile/601399199/fort_walton_bch_fl/utilis_usa.html
Page 2 has
http://oddpath.com/odd/?profile=601399199&name=
http://www.hotfrog.com/Products/Military-Shelters
Interestingly, the Hot Frog page is the category of "Military Shelters" but in the description of your various competitors in that arena - some list "Homeless Shelters".
Somewhere your company was listed under the local business of "homeless shelters" so this information is being propagated across various local listing sites such as above. Google scrapes this data and so is therefore associating you with that category. Looks like an effect of Hummingbird possibly making some of these connections as well.
I still stand by my "so what" statement above, but if you wanted to take action, you need to clean up your local citations. The Moz Local tool would be a place to start, but you can contact the above websites directly as well. I concur with Cyrus though, not sure if it is worth the effort.
Cheers!
-
There's a joke in there, but I'm going to let someone else tell it.
Cheers!
-
Are you sure this is not a personalization effect? I searched "homeless shelter" but did not see your website anywhere. I also ran it through the Moz rank checker and http://www.utilisusa.com/ is not ranked in the top 50 for "homeless shelter".
My bigger question is "so what?" If you sell a bunch of military grade soft-wall shelters to organizations that use them as homeless shelters, sounds like you have a new revenue stream. If anything, you could use it as a marketing angle. Donate some shelters to the Red Cross, show how your shelters made a difference in a recent disaster recovery. Sounds like some pretty awesome, durable structures if they can help people out of difficult situations.
-
It's quite common. Moz tends to receive a lot of traffic for "porn"
Go figure.
If it's not a lot of traffic and it's not causing too many problems, it may not be worth the effort of trying to "unrank" for the word. Otherwise by removing important keywords from you on-page elements you may inadvertently unrank for other important terms.
-
You do have "home" in the alt tag in a few places: alt="utilis-tents-navigation-home-button". This plus the shelter kw's may be enough to get indexed for that phrase. The alt on this page is useless, so try removing it.
-
Are there any links pointing to the page or domain containing homeless or is there word homeless on the page getting traffic?
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
-
My website is constantly decreasing
For few weeks ago my website is constantly decreasing in search position. I lost keywords and is gooooing down.
Technical SEO | | Dan_Tala
Although it is well rated on several on page and off page seo verification software that I have tried.
I checked Google search console and Analytics and found no major problems. However… from one day to another it keeps going down.
I also checked what the main competitors are doing and they are not doing well, at all.
The main competitor actually has a creepy website. Totally devoid of onpage or offpage SEO but with an enormous number of backlinks. And of a very bad quality, which should disqualify it, still…
Few weeks ago I changed something.
In the pages I had H1, 4xH2, no H3 and an H4 without content.
An unnatural H tag structure.
Now I have H1, H2, H3, 3xH4, with the coherent information.
Theoretically, Google should have been “happy” or I’m missing something. I use a SAAS platform.
I just found out that they made changes to the keywords (tags).
I am selling toner cartridges for printers.
So…
The tags are printer models and generate a url in which they have the products.
Ex. https://www.sertit.ro/cartus-imprimanta-cilindru-color-hp-laserjet-pro-m-177fw goes to the products for that printer model.
The question is… should I make tag canonical?
Is it possible for products to loose so much in Google search?0 -
Website ranking declined after connecting to CDN
Hi! We are trying to rank https://windowmart.ca for various local search terms. Our head office is in Edmonton where we try to rank https://windowmart.ca/edmonton-windows-doors/ for such terms as "windows Edmonton", "replacement windows Edmonton", "windows and doors Edmonton" as well as others. The website was the leader in its niche for around 2 years. Then we've got some server related issues, moved to a new server and connected CDN Nitropack that really improved our google speed test results. Recently we noticed that our rankings started to drop. Do you know if Nitropack can negatively effect local SEO rankings? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | vaskrupp0 -
My WP website got attack by malware & now my website site:www.example.ca shows about 43000 indexed page in google.
Hi All My wordpress website got attack by malware last week. It affected my index page in google badly. my typical site:example.ca shows about 130 indexed pages on google. Now it shows about 43000 indexed pages. I had my server company tech support scan my site and clean the malware yesterday. But it still shows the same number of indexed page on google. Does anybody had ever experience such situation and how did you fixed it. Looking for help. Thanks FILE HIT LIST:
Technical SEO | | Chophel
{YARA}Spam_PHP_WPVCD_ContentInjection : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-tmp.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-vcd.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-content/themes/oceanwp.zip
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example2/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example2/public_html/wp-includes/63292236.php
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example3/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example4/public_html/wp-admin/28855846.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/wp-22.php
{HEX}php.generic.cav7.421 : /home/example5/public_html/SEUN.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/Webhook.php0 -
Multilingual website
My website is https://www.india-visa-gov.in and we are doing multilingual. There are three options 1. TLD eg india-visa-gov.fr (French) india-visa-gov.de (German) 2. Subdomain eg: fr.india-visa-gov.in (French) de.india-visa-gov.in (German) 3. Folders https://www.india-visa-gov.in/fr/ (French) https://www.india-visa-gov.in/de/ (German) We have tried the 3rd option but need to know whether its better or not for the long term health from SEO. Does the MOZ DA carry better in Subdomain or TLD or Folders? What does MOZ recommend to maintain DA? Thanks
Technical SEO | | amitdipsite150220200 -
Stop Words and keyword optimization
Ok, so I understand Google doesn't use stopwords (like "a" or "the"). Therefore if I am optimize for a keyword phrase, and say find an opportunity for say: "how to create stuff something" But it actually reads better as (although doesn't sound completely out of place as above) "how to create stuff in something" Which is better for SEO? (ignore usability \ readability in your replies please and assume it reads reasonably either way as that was just an example)
Technical SEO | | TheWebMastercom0 -
Google ranking my site abroad, how to stop?
Hi Mozzers, I have a UK based ecommerce site, that sells only to the UK. Over the last month Google has started ranking my site on foreign flavours of Google, so I keep getting traffic coming to my site from Europe, America and the far east that we could never sell to, and as a result bounce is going up and engagement is going down. They are definitely coming to the site from google searches that relate to my product type, but in regions I do not service. Is there a way to stop google doing this? I have the target set to UK in WMT, but is there anything else I can do? I worried about my UK ranking being damaged by an increasing overall bounce rate. Thanks
Technical SEO | | FDFPres0 -
Blog Ranking NOT home page main website?!
Hi, Our Blog (http://blog.thailand-investigation.com) is ranking for some of our major keywords but not our home page (http://www.thailand-investigation.com)!? Our blog is WordPress and our main website is HTML. It seems like the search engines consider that they are 2 separate websites!? When I check the incoming links to our website, I get also the blog links!!!??? Is it normal? Do I have to build a relation of some kind or write some code saying that it is our Blog... I don't know! I'm not a SEO specialist or even a webmaster. I'm a small business owner and take care on my website. I created by myself but never learned! So, please help! Thanks
Technical SEO | | MichelMauquoi0 -
I can buy a domain from a competitor. Whats the best way to make good use of these links for my existing website
I can buy a domain from a competitor. Whats the best way to make good use of these links for my existing website
Technical SEO | | Archers0