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Thanks Alan and Richard. That's just the sort of confirmation I was hoping for.

Ahoy!

I'm working with a publishing site that has a series of primary topics for free content using a fairly wide keyword, under which we have cluster of associated keywords used in posts. For usability/simplicity some of the neccesarily broader topics have keywords within their cluster that aren't that closely related.

We've had success with keeping related keywords and content grouped like this, but I'm not sure how much value to put on this.

The issue is that we're writing a new free report (download) that is about "Y". "Y" is in topic category "X". X and Y are loosely related (it made more sense to put Y in X than anywhere else, and adwords/wonderwheel back this up), but there is an obvious disconnect where not everyone searching for X is interested in Y and vice versa.

Since the new free report is predominantly about Y, should I go to the effort of using X keyword as a primary keyword since we've got a substantial amount of content in X topic where the two are related and the report will be housed? Or should I just focus on optomizing for Y and not care that it's in the X topic.

My feeling is that we'd be better off just focusing on Y, and our general X topic page can continue to be the page focused on ranking for X, even if we normally aim to get an associated free report ranking for other topics' primary keyword.

(Blast, that's a rather long and confusing explanation.)