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
-
Why Google de-rank a website.
Hi, I was inspecting a website which is covering the topic of best wheelbarrow of 2021, it is a new website and and starts ranking on google. But, after few days it got de-rank automatically and Moz is also not showing any result to that. I was wandering why this just happened and what should I do if I made my website and will not face this kind of situation?
Technical SEO | | Moeen22330 -
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 -
Can an external firewall affect rankings?
For security reasons we are now routing traffic through an external firewall cum CDN. Our server and domain IPs remain the same, but any request is routed through an external IP, which then forwards the traffic. Would our rankings be affected because of IP changes? Thanks Sam
Technical SEO | | samgold0 -
Company name ranking
Hi all, I hope somebody can share their thoughts on the below. A web designer launched my client's new website and I have been tasked with the SEO. I was approached with an immediate problem, www.clientswebsite.co.uk was ranking 9th for their company name after being indexed by Google. The search results above www.clientswebsite.co.uk were related to my client but not all, for example a direct competitor was also ranking. I have been working on the SEO for 2-3 weeks and I just managed to get to 3rd position for the company name, and then www.clientswebsite.co.uk disappeared from page 1! And now instead, an irelevant sub page is now ranking for the company name on page 2 (a contact page). I have checked and the home page is still indexed (did a site: check). The only problem software picks up is a redirect chain (http://homepage -> http://www.homepage -> https://homepage) the web developers said it wouldn't impact rankings (when I asked them to edit the htaccess file to fix it) I've listed below the SEO tasks I completed whilst attempting to rank the company name: I set up analytics and webmaster tools, in which I set up preferred domain (www) Added a sitemap Edited meta data making sure company name was included I contacted the websites above www.clientswebsite.co.uk that were relevant and asked them to place a link linking to their new website, I was successful with a couple of these. I placed www.clientswebsite.co.uk on all of their social media profiles I reformatted headers on their home page, making sure the H1 included my client's company name I found 2 extra versions of my client's home page (not exact copies, but very similar content) that had been published, so I decided to 301 redirect these to the correct home page Activated SSL and forced to HTTPS I would really appreciate it if anyone could share their thoughts here, whether it be explanations or possible solutions Adam
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
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 -
Can too many pages hurt crawling and ranking?
Hi, I work for local yellow pages in Belgium, over the last months we introduced a succesfull technique to boost SEO traffic: we have created over 150k of new pages, all targeting specific keywords and all containing unique content, a site architecture to enable google to find these pages through crawling, xml sitemaps, .... All signs (traffic, indexation of xml sitemaps, rankings, ...) are positive. So far so good. We are able to quickly build more unique pages, and I wonder how google will react to this type of "large scale operation": can it hurt crawling and ranking if google notices big volumes of content (unique content)? Please advice
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories0 -
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 -
Does a TM in the keyword have effect?
If I include TM in a keyword string, does this make it another keyword or does Google ignore that? Example: Kentucky Hot Sauce vs Kentucky Hot (TM) sauce. Of course the TM would be done properly via ™ Cheers.
Technical SEO | | Malarowski0