: Unwanted Content Keywords registering by Google I've been working on a site for a new company that is in the tactical gear/survival gear niche and have ran into a hitch with the keywords that

@BetL925

The content keyword list in Google Webmaster Tools measures which keywords are used on the most pages on your site compared to other sites. So if you have a shopping cart on every page of your site, you will have "cart" in your content keywords. Words like "the" don't show up in the list because most sites have them on every page.

As long as this list doesn't have spam words on it, it isn't hurting you. Google says that you should watch this list to see if your site is hacked. If you see "viagra" on this list, then you know there is a problem.

The words on this list don't indicate what you are likely to rank for. Google's relevance algorithms are much more sophisticated than "used on many pages of your site." The relevance algorithms take into account:


If the word is used in the title
If the word is used near the beginning of the title
If the word appears in headings
If the word appears multiple times on the page
If the word is used in inbound anchor text
If users click on your site Google puts it in the search results for that term


The "content keywords" don't appear to factor in any of these other relevancy factors, just how many pages on your site use the words.

I've tried adjusting the words on my site to make this content keywords list more accurately reflect the thing I would like the site to rank for. In my experience, doing so doesn't help. Using a word on more pages on my site doesn't seem to help my rank better for those keywords. Removing irrelevant keywords doesn't make the remaining keywords rank better.

Bottom line: don't worry about the content keywords unless there is spam listed.

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@Gail5422790

Just looking at your list, it looks like you need more content. If things like "cart, compare, and wishlist' are ranking because of some buttons on your site, you need more blogs or text related to your niche.

In other words, your descriptions and posts should outnumber and overwhelm your store keywords.

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@Annie201

Use textalyser.net and run your pages through it. It will list you the top keywords as well as the top pairs of keywords and if you don't want google to rank for a keyword, then try to make the keyword density for it to under 1%. Just make sure at the same time you don't make any keyword density set to over 5%.

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