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 -
Two websites, one company, one physical address - how to make the best of it in terms of local visibility?
Hello! I have one company which will be operating in two markets, printing and website design / development. I’m planning on building two websites, each for every market. But I’m a bit confused about how to optimize these websites locally. My thought is to use my physical address for one website (build citations, get listed in directories, etc. ) and PO Box for another. Do you think there is a better idea?
Technical SEO | | VELV1 -
I am trying to generate GEO meta tag for my website where on one page there are multiple locations My question is, Can I add GEO tagging for every address?
Am I restricted to 1 geo tag per page or can i add multiple geo tags ?
Technical SEO | | lina_digital0 -
How can I stop a tracking link from being indexed while still passing link equity?
I have a marketing campaign landing page and it uses a tracking URL to track clicks. The tracking links look something like this: http://this-is-the-origin-url.com/clkn/http/destination-url.com/ The problem is that Google is indexing these links as pages in the SERPs. Of course when they get indexed and then clicked, they show a 400 error because the /clkn/ link doesn't represent an actual page with content on it. The tracking link is set up to instantly 301 redirect to http://destination-url.com. Right now my dev team has blocked these links from crawlers by adding Disallow: /clkn/ in the robots.txt file, however, this blocks the flow of link equity to the destination page. How can I stop these links from being indexed without blocking the flow of link equity to the destination URL?
Technical SEO | | UnbounceVan0 -
How long does it take to rank easy keywords?
I have an established site with low keyword ranking and the keyword I am wanting to rank for it rated below 10 on Moz. It has been a few days since I published the article.
Technical SEO | | Begbie20060 -
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 -
How to fix keyword cannibalization?
Hello All, I am a webmaster of http://www.bannerbuzz.com and I have some problem in keyword cannibalization in my store, i have lots of categories related to banners, and in Banner section my my keyword is vinyl banners and my all categories urls structure connected with vinyl banners, I am definitely sure that keyword cannibalization issue in my website and i want to resolve it as soon as possible, so can anyone please help me how can i resolve this issue with effective way or without affected my keyword ranking? My Keywords Vinyl Banners : http://www.bannerbuzz.com/full-color-vinyl-banners.html
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit
Custom Banners : http://www.bannerbuzz.com/custom-vinyl-banners.html
Outdoor Banners : http://www.bannerbuzz.com/outdoor-vinyl-banners.html My 1 keyword vinyl banners is affected, so can anyone please look at these pages and let me know how can i resolve keyword cannibalization from my website.? Thanks
BannerBuzz.com0 -
Why is my website banned?
IMy website is Costume Machine at www.costumemachine.com . My site has been banned for 1 year now. I have requested that google reconsider my site 3 times without luck. The site is dynamic and basically pulls in feeds from affiliate sites. We have added over 1,500 pages of original content. The site has been running great since 2008 without any penalties. I don't think I got hit with any linking penalty. I cleaned up all questionable links last November when the penalty hit. Am I being hit with a "thin" site penalty? If that is the issue what is the best way to fix the problem?
Technical SEO | | tadden0