Poison Keywords in Search Engine Optimisation - November 21st, 2006
A poison keyword is a word or phrase on a web page that causes a detrimental effect to page rank. Various sources suggest that these are words like forum, resources, website, about, help, policy, privacy, contact, search engine, search and a few others. As with normal keywords, if these words are found within links or in the Meta tags they will have a greater detrimental effect on your page rank than if they were just in your page text. They tell the search engines that the page is of low value.
Poison keywords are nothing but a myth, the phrase probably being created by marketing companies trying to get more business.
You might see the phrase poison keyword in conjunction with some search engine optimisation companies or software. They will analyse your site and show you that you have these words in your text and try to sell you their expertise in order to make your site search engine friendly.
Let me dispel the myth.
I you take an example of the apparently poison keyword of forum. At the time of writing this, searching for the word on Google gives around 3,340,000,000 results. Searching for the subject of dog within these listings gives 31,000,000 results, the first page of which are all forums or discussion boards about dogs. So if the word forum was poisonous to listings wouldnt these results be different? You would expect to see everything related to dogs come first, followed by all of the dog forums. The very fact that the top ranking page has the word forum over 30 times in many different contexts shows that having any poison keywords on your site has no detrimental effect. You can try any of the other words and view the results.
To make another example, when researching this blog entry I typed in the query poison keywords. The first page of results consists of forums with people talking about that subject. It is therefore the content of the page that the search engines look for, any apparently poison keywords within the page dont have any effect on the listsing.
Phil Norton
SEO Engineer
