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I have a website for hosting my "Responsive Pagination" jQuery Plugin. As you imagine these pages have a lot of code blocks showing how to use different parts of my plugin. Now that my site has been online a couple of weeks I want to work hard to increase my page rank because I'm a few pages back even when searching for multiple directly relevant terms.

When looking at my "Content Keywords" section of Webmaster Tools, I see that most of my keywords are being pulled out of my code snippets, which are words that will likely never be searched: enter image description here (pagination occurrence count is 26, the rest are 10 or less)

Out of these words, only a few (pagination, responsive, dynamic, jquery, plugin) are relevant to the content as a whole. Yet since I use code example so much a lot of them are being pushed down.

Can I block Google from using these words as my keywords? Since I'd just be blocking some and not increasing others would it have any positive effect or just lose some potential search terms?

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  • We get questions like this quite a lot. The Google Search Console Content Keyword list is pure junk. Do not pay attention to it. It should never have existed and the fact that it still exists is ridiculous. Seriously. Move on. Worry about something else. Cheers!!
    – closetnoc
    Sep 30, 2016 at 18:26
  • @closetnoc Ah sorry for the potential duplicate/related then, I suppose I was searching to specifically. Thanks for the info!
    – user2070057
    Sep 30, 2016 at 18:29
  • You are okay! We want people to ask questions. It is frustrating for us to see things out there that causes so much confusion for people. This list is one of the biggest. Google is doing it's users a disservice with the list. It bolsters the notion that Google makes keyword matches while it never really has. Search, for Google, is really about whole language and not about keywords. Cheers!!
    – closetnoc
    Sep 30, 2016 at 18:47

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The "content keywords" report is intended to monitor your site for spam. When hackers hack a site, they often add pages for "Viagra" or "Casino" related keywords.

If you see unexpected keywords in this report, then you have a problem with a hacked site and you need to take action. If you were the one that created the content with the keywords, there is no action you need to take.

To appear higher on this report, a keyword has to appear on a large number of pages on your site. The report takes into account how common words are on sites in general so that common words such as "the" do not generally appear.

If you want a keyword to appear higher, use it on more pages. If you want it to appear lower, use it on fewer pages. It does not appear to matter how many times on each page a keyword is used. I have tested this fairly straightforward relationship that is powering this report with my own websites.

Optimizing your keywords based on this report will not improve your site's search engine rankings. I've tested that as well. Even when I use a term on more pages and get it higher in this list, rankings for that term have not improved. Google uses other factors for ranking.

Based on my experiments, this report is only good for spam detection. Having words that you made up in this report should not negatively effect your site in any way.

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