Medical Marijuana Keywords
-
Has anyone seen any evidence of Google penalizing for Medical Marijuana related keywords in states where that is legal?
Thanks in advance.
-
Hi,
Just did a quick check on a few marijuana related keywords in Semrush. Don't know if they are really penalising the keywords, top results always seem to be a mix of (governmental) information, and sites where pro/contra are discussed:
- wikipedia
- http://medicalmarijuana.procon.org/
- http://www.drugpolicy.org/medical-marijuana - http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/state-medical-marijuana-laws.aspx
- http://norml.org/legal/medical-marijuana-2
- http://www.azdhs.gov/medicalmarijuana/
I guess that unless the queries are very specific (like: buy medical marijuana online) it will be very difficult to get high positions in the SERP's.
I would assume that the risk of having this content on your site is pretty low, especially if your content is balanced (pro/contra). We manage the biggest health site in the Netherlands (where recreational use of marijuana is allowed since quite some time). While marijuana is not really our top keyword, we do have like 120 articles/news items published and it does not seem to do any harm (as our organic traffic continues to grow).
Hope this helps,
Dirk
- wikipedia
-
Thanks for responding Ryan.
Google seems pretty vague on this and this is just a part of one of our client's business so we don't want to optimize in a way that could get his whole site penalized or discredited.
-
There's not much on this in sourced material other than some mentions in places like: http://www.google.com/goodtoknow/familysafety/advice/#behaviors, "Set age-appropriate filters on your computers and your child’s mobile devices: Filters and other internet safety tools block categories of inappropriate websites a child can view, such as sites containing pornography, violence, gambling, and illegal drug information." Google's SafeSearch is primarily focused on pornography. And the filters mentioned in the link above are in reference to installs on local machines.
Is there some filter going on though? Try typing, 'california medical marijuana' into the search bar and notice where suggested search ends... Obviously at this moment in time there's a legal gray area for this topic as a few states have made medical and recreational use legal, while federally it is still illegal in the US. And right now, search tends to mirror that grayness as well.
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
-
How to do effective keyword research with categories and subcategories?
Hi all, I'm trying to breakdown some SEO 101 tips and start from scratch. Starting with Keywords! I would like to audit our site for main keywords, grouping them in categories and subcategories. My questions are: 1. Is it possible to see where we rank on google AND search trends of visits to our site?
Algorithm Updates | | Eric_S
2. What is a good method or structure to document (excel?)
3. What analysis can be made from finding the results of these keywords and how can I make use of this? As a beginner your help is much appreciated!!2 -
We have a terrible, severe loss in our Keywords rankings this week, can you please help us what would happen in only 7 days ?
On the date 3rd of October we had almost 55 Keywords up and 44 almost down, Today after 7 days there is a severe drop 90 keyword is down, 7 only are up, and that's one website. My other website had 57 words up and 175 down. Our strategy in building backlinks: Directory submissions, article submissions and some blog commenting, we keep into consideration to choose only websites with high page rank (Page Rank 2 and higher). Also we had an updated on one of our websites since 1st of June a new URL structure, content, new pages and sitemap. Both websites has tons of keywords that we worked on increasing its rank and some we haven't touch them and its ranks was decreased. Does the new Google "hummingbird" have something to do with that? is there anything wrong with our strategy? Please provide us with your feedback ASAP.
Algorithm Updates | | ali8810 -
Google webmaster tool content keywords Top URLs
GWT->Optimization->Content Keywords section... If we click on the keyword it will further shows the variants and Top URLs containing those variants. My problem is none of the important pages like product details pages, homepage or category pages are present in that Top URLs list. All the news, guides section url's are listed in the Top URLs section for most important keyword that is also present in my domain name. How to make google realize the important pages for the important keyword?
Algorithm Updates | | BipSum0 -
Keyword Stuffing
Hi, I have a particular page I am working on fully optimised as per the page rank tool and grading A. Problem is, there is still one issue on the page, the keyword I want to rank for in particular on that page is reporting that I am over using the word. I have looked through the HTML on the body of the page and see that the actual content is not an issue, I have less than 15 mentions of the keyword, the problem actually arises from the Nav Bar The word I am ranking for say is football Well in the nav-bar, I have several pages that are named football-xxx.html So where the actual page content only has 12 mentions of the keyword Football, list has another 13 due to my page naming properties.* Football- xxx Football- xxx Football- xxx Football- xxx Football- xxx Football- xxx ....... And so on up to 13 different pages with a similar naming structure (obviously the XXX are products like socks, shorts, tops, boots etc) So, without asking the obvious, I assume that the way to change is would be to rename the pages (can't really happen), or remove the term football from the body of the content on the website. So firstly, is the Google algorithms not smart enough to recongise that the content in the menu tag is in fact the nav bar ... and page names as opposed to keyword stuffing. Also, how did anyone else handle a similair situation And lastly, I am assuming basic on common sense alone that Keyword stuffing is a big no no, of everything I have learned though SEO Moz, this makes clear and concise sense to me ... So how do I resolve the issue I have here Many thanks in advance for any help offered Regards John
Algorithm Updates | | Johnny4B0 -
50% of my keywords just had a significant drop for no reason no changes?
I just looked at a report for one of my sites in moz pro and Improvement: 35 slots 35/75 keywords just dropped on google, I didn't make any changes recently Ranking Changes Improvement: 12 slots 12 Improved Improvement: 35 slots 35 Declined Many dropping 5 - 22 places! Any ideas on whats up, thank fully it didn't effect traffic, its pretty low anyways, but it has stayed the same... But still dropped to page 5 for lots of stuff. Strange. Did google just update or something? Thanks for any ideas.
Algorithm Updates | | syndicate0 -
Keyword density and meta tags
Hi, I've just checked the number of keywords appearing on my website's pages. On some of them the keyword density was way too high (7-10%) if you included the meta tags, but all under 3.5% if I didn't include the keywords and description meta tags. So my question is - when looking at number of keywords used per page, do I have to worry about what's in those meta tags? Do the keywords in there count towards keyword density / number of keywords per page? Thanks, Luke
Algorithm Updates | | McTaggart0 -
Keyword rich domains sliding fast
I decided not to worry too much about the statements from google indicating that they were going to consider key word rich domains as a negative for ranking since any of the sites I work on that have them are totally relevant to the content on the sites. However, since recent Google algorithm updates I see these domains have suddenly slid from top 3 positions to page 4 or beyond in Google SERP's. Nothing has changed on these sites in the intervening time and no change is evident in Bing or Yahoo SERP's. Is it just my imagination, or are others seeing the same thing for keyword rich domains? and has anyone yet determined the best way to deal with this problem?
Algorithm Updates | | ShaMenz0 -
Will google punish us for using formulaic keyword-rich content on different pages on our site?
We have 100 to 150 words of SEO text per page on www.storitz.com. Our challenge is that we are a storage property aggregator with hundreds of metros. We have to distinguish each city with relevant and umique text. If we use a modular approach where we mix and match pre-written (by us) content, demographic and location oriented text in an attempt to create relevant and unique text for multiple (hundreds) of pages on our site, will we be devalued by Google?
Algorithm Updates | | Storitz0