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I am running widgets in the sidebars of my wordpress blogs. In one blog e.g. I use the "Archive" Widget which allows access to all articles of a given month. As the blog is existing for a while this contains links from "October 2015" to "March 2009".

Lately calling the Google Webmasters Search Console I learned in the tab "Content-keywords" that my page is mainly about the keywords "January", "February", "March" a.s.o. as they are visible on every page.

Even if maybe I could do without this widget on this blog, on another blog I implemented a static promotion of an Ebook in my sidebar, which I can't want to discard that easy. Problem is that according to the "Content-keywords" this other blog is mainly about this Ebook - and a bit about Monthnames :-(

As far as I see all other keywords are derived from the sidebar as well, such as categories, tag cloud and other...

I consider these content-keywords are those of the whole blog and the single article pages have their own keywords but currently I am not even sure of that.

I tried to use the "Data Highlighter" to explain the blog content to Google but this allows only highlighting of author, title, categories and date but not of the article text itself.

So what can I do to keep the content in my sidebars (which is the same content for every blog page) but have Google generate it's keywords from the Articles?

Or how do other (Wordpress) blogs handle this problem?

Edit:

Obviously this seems a common problem ( Google finding irrelevant keywords on my pages? ) which is known for 4+ years ... ?!

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The Content Keywords list in Google Search Console is, at least in part, junk. Do not pay too much attention to it. In over three years of watching, no-one has found my site using any term in my Content Keywords list. Most, if not all of the terms in my list are not significantly important or distinguishable for search.

Do not worry about what you see in this list.

Except for one thing. It is a good indicator of over optimizing terms that you may not have intended.

Here is what you do not know.

Google uses several of your pages HTML DOM model to separate out repeated part of your page from your content. I can distinguish a header from a footer from a sidebar. One major reason for doing this is to be better able to separate out individual page content from non-content. This has been in place for a very long time and Google is very good at weighting content items appropriately- especially in the past few years (3 plus).

So in short, there really is nothing to fix!

You are actually okay! This feature from Google causes a lot of confusion and should be cleaned-up or removed.

As a side-note: Please do not follow the keyword chase lemmings. Google is a semantics search engine now and is unique in that it started out as a semantics based search engine in 1997 and has sought applying semantics more than any other search engine ever has. This means that keywords and keyword matches are actually an incidental outcome as part of the process and not a function of the search engine. SEOs like you to think that Google makes keyword matches when in reality it makes search intent matches against terms that may or may not appear on your site at all. So stop killing yourself by worrying about specific keywords and just do naturally written content and make sure that you are using good and clear language appropriate for your audience. Do yourself the favor. It is more about linguistics than about singular terms.

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  • Thanks for your detailed answer. No worry, I am no "keyword lemming" but actually I was nevertheless worried that my individual content was reduced to bare monthnames. On my not Wordpress sites (which have static content parts like footers, menus etc too) I did not observe such a strong tendency to misleading keywords. So I was afraid I would not be found on what I actually wrote and all just because of some sidebar gadgets. But if you say those keyword lists are junk to a far degree I am feeling more relieved :-)
    – Wooz
    Commented Oct 14, 2015 at 20:38
  • @Wooz I did not mention in the answer that if you watch search results as you use Google for your own searches, you will find that it never (or seems to never) match against headers, footers, and sidebars in the SERP snippet. I just warn about the keyword lemmings because the SEO industry has us all marching in the wrong direction. ;-) Just a friendly warning I like to give here just in case (JIC). You would be surprised (or not) by how much keyword chatter there is and how much we contend with it here. We are a kind and generous lot and like to set the record straight where we can.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Oct 14, 2015 at 20:45
  • As I understood from my scarce knowledge about SEO is that keywords has been the nonplusultra till some years ago. But I never had the will nor the time to hunt after this. I always put my weight on content which I heard is the next big thing in SEO - though I did not profit of this if this is true... Hum, now writing this and considering the deeper impact of this it makes me a bit sad ;-)
    – Wooz
    Commented Oct 14, 2015 at 21:11
  • @Wooz Keywords was all the rage as you said and that content has taken over in some of the SEO chatter. I know what you mean about profiting. It is hard to get attention. There are some strong signals I write about in other areas such as the title tag, inbound link text, description meta-tag (really - I am not kidding), etc. It can be difficult with the limitations placed on Google title tag length, however, signals in the content can really help. Headers are significant (they also do not match in SERPs), however regular content can play a more significant role. I am figuring out what works.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Oct 14, 2015 at 21:24
  • Actually "attention" is the main problem. I spent most of my web devoloping and web publishing time in creating "good" websites, meaning good content and good technique as long I think it is a useful thing (such as load time, titles and even meta description). But beside of one wave of indexing myself in web directories some years ago I never put effort in advertising and link building and neither in keyword researches. As most of my websites are mostly of small impact I consider that either I didn't do well in what I focused on, or self-promoting and keywording still have their large effect.
    – Wooz
    Commented Oct 14, 2015 at 21:40

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