Increasing Website Traffic

Tip 21: Poison Words

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Some words can be pure poison.

There is some debate as to whether or not there are such thing as 'poison words'. Many Webmasters agree that pages that certain words like links, link exchange, forum, directory and resources won't be looked upon favorably by Google. While I don't think they'll de-index your entire site if you use these words, I'd avoid them as much as possible just to be safe.

Also, there are many 'adult' words that are quite clearly poisonous to your ranking. Use your imagination - I'm sure you can figure out what they are!

A few people even say that the words forum and contact might have a neutral effect. In other words, they're not going to be ranked high, but they will not often get a PageRank or appear in SERPs. Forums and contact pages shouldn't hurt your site, but these individual pages might not do so well.

But, but, but...

There ARE sites that appear in Google with these words.

I've come across sites that use the words link exchange,

directory, and other poison words.

As I said at the beginning of this tip, there is some debate about whether or not poison words exist. From my experiences, pages with these words do not get ranked well in Google. Sometimes you'll see link exchange pages indexed and PageRanked on very old, well-established sites. In general though, don't expect to get a Google PageRank for pages that are full of poison words.

Be creative. Instead of titling your page Link Exchanges, title it, Favorite Sites. Instead of writing Contact Me in big, bold letters across your page, write something different like, Drop Me a Line! Choose your words carefully and you'll be fine.

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Notice - This website, like most SEO websites, uses words and phrases such as link exchange and directory all the time. It doesn't complete kill us in the rankings. As long as you avoid the seriously inappropriate 'adult words' you should be okay.

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Why Google looks for 'poison words'

Google doesn't want contact pages and pirvacy policy pages, and directory sites, and resource pages to appear at the top of the SERP rankings. If these words are used in the title, header, or url, it raises a red flag. The appearance of a word doesn't lower the value of the entire site, but it may result in a lower pagerank for that particular page.

Why It's Not a Big Deal

It's not a big deal if your contact page or privacy policy page, or links pages gets a low pagerank. It's not a big deal if these pages don't appear in the SERPs. Why? It's not where you want your visitors to land anyway. You wantthem to land on your homepage, or at least on some worthwhile content.

Increasing Website Traffic -Poison Words