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I've been playing a lot closer attention to my website's SEO since a Panda release at the beginning of the year murdered me.

One of the things I've noticed is that in Google webmaster tools some of the content keywords it lists are completely bogus.

For example these are some highly ranked words that as far as I'm concerned should not be ranked at all.

  1. "browser" - Pulled from my noscript message
  2. "email" - pulled from a label in the comments section (I'm running WordPress)
  3. "JavaScript" - Pulled from my noscript message
  4. "address" - Pulled from the comments section

is there a way I can get Google to either ignore certain chunks of html, or disregard certain words from it's keyword algorithm?

Dan Sherman
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2 Answers2

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Keywords are just a frequency count. I wouldnt worry about them too much.

Q: Why do my Webmaster Tools stats show common phrases such as "buy now" that are not directly related to my site? A: While some common words and phrases are filtered by Webmaster Tools, there may be some that you use which are not. Having these words or phrases listed in your Webmaster Tools account does not mean that our algorithms will view your site as being only relevant for those keywords. While Webmaster Tools mostly counts the occurences of words on your site, our web-search algorithms use well over 200 other factors for crawling, indexing and ranking. In other words: don't worry if you see keywords like this listed in your Webmaster Tools account.

Keep in mind that this data may take some time to be updated (Googlebot needs to recrawl your pages). Also, since all content from your pages are used for this data, it's possible that it also contains words and phrases like "buy now" which may not be that relevant to your site on a whole.

https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq--webmaster-tools#strange-words2

user29671
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  • I've read Google's official line, and personally I don't buy it. While it might not be hurting it to have high ranking random words, it's definitely not helping. I worked around it by putting the noscript tag at the very bottom of the page (right before the closing body tag), and then did a light box style effect to position it. This should help devalue the words, because Google puts less emphasis on content the further down the page it is. – Dan Sherman Oct 20 '14 at 21:12
  • lol, do you rank for those words ? Are they in webmaster tools for search queries ? No. – user29671 Oct 21 '14 at 02:32
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Yes, it looks like you can have Google ignore certain chunks of HTML. This is from Stack question a few years back: Is there a way to make robots ignore certain text? 

<p>This is normal (X)HTML content that will be indexed by Google.</p>

<!--googleoff: index-->

<p>This (X)HTML content will NOT be indexed by Google.</p>

<!--googleon: index>
Community
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Matt Wilson
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    only works on Google Appliances according to John Mueller! http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14314111/avoid-google-to-crawl-part-of-a-page-googleoff-all-and-googleon-all – Dan Sherman Oct 17 '14 at 22:43