Google Penguin w/ Meta Keywords
-
It's getting really hard filtering through the Penguin articles flying around right now so excuse me if this has been addressed:
I know that Google no longer uses the meta keywords as indicators (VERY old news). But I'm just wondering if they are starting to look at them as a bigger spam indicator since Penguin is looking at over-optimization.
If yes, has anyone read good article indicating so?
The reason I ask is because I have two websites, one is authoritative and the other… not so much. Recently my authoritative website has taken a dip in rankings, a significant dip. The non-authoritative one has increased in rankings… by a lot.
Now, the authoritative website pages that use meta-keywords seem to be the ones that are having issues… so it really has me wondering. Both websites compete with each other and are fairly similar in their offerings.
I should also mention that the meta-keywords were implemented a long time ago… before I took over the account.
Also important to note, I never purchase links and never practice any spammy techniques. I am as white hat as it gets which has me really puzzled as to why one site dropped drastically.
-
Thanks for the link.
I have them on lots of pages and am not worried about them... but they are not "overstuffed".
-
It is pretty much covered in this article by Danny Sullivan.
Excerpt: So use the tag? Sure, if you want to take a chance that by overstuffing it, you’ll cause Bing to think you’re spamming. Be safe, be smart, save your time. Don’t use it.
-
Can anyone suggest one reason why google would consider meta keywords a sin?
If nobody has good reasons then I doubt that google would penalize for them.
-
While I haven't seen any Penguin update that mentioned the meta keywords specifically, there was a lot of talk of over optimization and the meta keywords can certainly fall in that arena. Old webmasters would stuff the meta keywords with tons of similar words. The meta keywords has no upside at all and can potentially be a red flag to both Bing and Google if keywords in this meta tag are not consistent with page content.
All said, I would look for other reasons why the site may of been consumed by the penguin. But if your meta keywords are excessive and repetitious I would definitely remove them.
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
-
Sometimes our meta description being displayed is not ours?
We just launched our new website a week ago (also switched to Wordpress). Yesterday I noticed that sometimes our homepage Meta Description displays something different in Google results than what we have set. I had others confirm the same result on their computers. I asked all who have been involved with marketing for company if that description was ever used for the company, as it seemed odd and worded very strange. No one has ever seen this or used this on any of our listings, social profiles etc ever. I check my meta descriptions set for home page and they were still correct. Also did a view source for cache page by Google and it showed the correct Meta Description. Still confused, I did an exact match search on the description and came up with about 30+ spam/link farm type of websites with this odd description noted by our name along with a link back to us. We never asked or paid for these. Why are they there? And how could this influence our homepage meta description? This has me very concerned that we might already be getting hacked. I see no other issues with the site. Looking for any help regarding: Why is the odd meta description showing up sometimes? Why do we have backlinks from these random sites? Is this all connected? Maybe trackbacks and pingbacks? Any help you can provide me is appreciated. Thanks! whJRuuQ
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pac-cooper0 -
Why is this Page Ranking for such a competitive keyword?
Hello MOZ Community! I have a question, I am hoping someone can help me understand. I am looking at this URL: http://goo.gl/BkSish ...it is ranking for this Keyword: POS Systems Now, this seems to be a pretty new URL, with few links being generated to it, as seen here: Open Site Explorer: http://moz.com/researchtools/ose/comparisons?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.shopkeep.com%2Fpos-system Majestic SEO: https://www.majesticseo.com/reports/site-explorer/link-profile?folder=&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.shopkeep.com%2Fpos-system&oq=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.shopkeep.com%2Fpos-system&IndexDataSource=F&wildcard=1 QUESTION: Can someone help us understand how or why this page is ranking so well, so quickly, for such a competitive Keyword? Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mstpeter0 -
Google Manual Penalty - Dilemma?
Hi Guys, A while back, my company had a 'partial match' manual penalty from google for 'unnatural links' pointing to our site. This glorious feat was accomplished by our previous SEO agency for quite heavily spamming links (directories, all kinds of low quality sites). That being said, when the penalty hit we really didnt see any drop in traffic. In fact, it was not long after the penalty that we launched a new website and since our traffic has grown quite significantly. we've doubled our total visits from prior penalty to now. This previous SEO also did submit a couple of reconsideration requests (both done loosely as to fool Google by only removing a small amount of links, then abit more the next time when it failed - this was obviously never going to work). Since then, I myself have submitted a reconsideration request which was very thorough, disavowing 85 Domains (every single one at domain level rather than the individual URLs as I didnt want to take any chances), as well as getting a fair few links removed from when the webmaster responded. I documented this all and made multiple contacts to the webmasters so i could show this to Google. This reconsideration request was not successful - Google made some new backlinks magically appear that i had not seen previously. But really, my main point is; am I going to do more damage removing more and more links in order to remove the penalty, because as it stands we haven't actually noticed any negative effects from the penalty! Perhaps the negative effects have not been noticed due to the fact that not long after the penalty, we did get a new site which was much improved and therefore would naturally get much more traffic than the old site, but overall it has not been majorly noticed. What do you guys think - is it worth risking drop in rankings to remove the penalty so we don't face any future issues, or should I not go too heavy with the link removal in order to preserve current rankings? (im really interested to see peoples views on this, so please leave a comment if you can help!)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Sandicliffe0 -
Does Trade Mark in URL matter to Google
Hello community! We are planning to clean up TM and R in the URLs on the website. Google has indexed these pages but some TM pages are have " " " instead displaying in URL from SERP. What's your thoughts on a "spring cleaning" effort to remove all TM and R and other unsafe characters in URLs? Will this impact indexed pages and ranking etc? Thank you! b.dig
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | b.digi0 -
Keyword Specific Domain | Outranking trend
Hey everyone, i looked for a similar question but didnt found anything. Ive been having a lot trouble competing with other websites that use the "exact-keyword" domain (www.keyword.com), then they just stuff some mediocre content and rank 1-3 in Google SERP for that keyword I wasnt worried before because i thought they were going to be penalized or decreased in ranking. But they bought several keyword domains and outrank everyone in almost every word. Their conversion rate cant be that good because of the mediocre content, but still i dont like the fact that they rank better just because of the keyword. Any comment on this? , what would you do? Regards
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JesusD0 -
Help required as difficulty removing Google algorithmic penalty
I am not an SEO expert but I am trying to recover my company's ranking on Google. We are a UK based baby shower company. Been established since 2003. We have used SEO companies a few years ago. On September 28th 2012 our rankings in Google dropped significantly on certain landing pages, others like our baby shower gifts page has remained position 1 for UK Google searches . Bing and Yahoo were unaffected. Searches for baby shower and baby shower decorations has gone from position 1 or 2 (behind wikipedia ) to these 2 landing pages being unranked in Google. I have for the first time ever gone through our back links, tried to locate bad or low quality links, emailed where possible, and set up in webmaster tools a dissavow file ( currently not acted upon by Google). I have also amended the text in the baby shower department so it does not read as keyword stuffed. It has been two and a half months now and sales has dropped significantly and me and the staff are getting very concerned. Our site is www.showermybaby.co.uk . We have not received a manual penalty. Any suggestions or help in removing this Google penalty would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | postagestamp0 -
Instability on the server - punishment in Google?
My site has about 50k pages indexed in Google. We are well respected, and we believe our stories add much value to the user. However, we are having serious problems with my hosting service and the site is unavailable for more than 15 hours. Unfortunately we also have no provision for him to return to work. I wonder if this kind of instability can cause some punishment on Google, if so, I wonder if there is anything we can do to tell Google that we are aware and working to resolve the problem.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | lucastudio0 -
Banned from google !
Hello, I realize (with GAnaltytics and command "link:") this morning that my domain host (share one) : "mlconseil.com" under which several websites are hosted has been banned from google. Here below the websites : www.amvo.fr :
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mozllo
www.apei-cpm.fr :
www.armagnac-les-vieux-chenes.fr
www.centraledelexpertise.fr
www.cleaning-pc-33.com
www.internet-33.fr
www.territoires-et-ntic.fr
www.vin-le-taillou.com
www.maliflo.asso.fr I don't kow why, i use since end of january 2011 IBP, only for some submissions to directories and for managing some lists of urls. I submitted about 30/40 directories never at the same time , but raher day after day, smoothly. On www.territoires-et-ntic.fr and www.amvo.fr which are blogs, i have installed some external rss feeds to display as articles, i decided to stop that but i don't know if it's related to such "blacklistage" from google. I don't use any nasty "blackhat" programs or else.. I'am really upset about that, i claim this morning with the same words as now, a new indexation but i don't know how long it will take ?Any idea ? Which are the tools which could help me to scan for maybe any malicious maleware on my hosting provider ? Many tks0