Strange Keywords Google Webmaster Tools
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Hey, I have a website about "coffee machines". Since a few months I added a vBulletin forum with vbSEO installed. The keywords Google found before I added the forum where highly related to the topic of my website (e.g. "coffee", "machine" etc), which I checked through the webmaster tools.
However, I recently checked again and noticed that Google finds mostly keywords like "post", "forum", "thread", "share" etc. with high significance. Those "keywords" only appear on the forum.
Now I'm a bit worried since Google states "These should reflect the subject matter of your site."
Any advice how to solve that issue?
Thanks!
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But still it's kinda confusing if Google sees keywords like "digg", "share" etc. as more significant as the actual topic ("coffee"). Also vBulletin is a well known forum software. I checked the vBSEO settings again and here is everything fine as well.
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With the addition of the forum Google is telling you that you're still a site about "coffee machines" but you're also a "forum" about "coffee machines". Still to reinforce the strength of your core content try linking back to pages on your original site from your forum. Also check for categorization issues in the sitemap and structure of the forum. You can also do goofy stuff like changing a thumbs up system to a "roasted beans" "raw beans" system. Things along those lines.
The main thing is that you're not seeing a reduction in rank like Dejan asked. If you're worried about advertisers missing out on your site being about coffee machines you can address this via the DoubleClick AdPlanner Publisher Center.
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Most of the posts are already in the index. I also added a sitemap and all posts are accessible by all users. You only have to be a logged in when viewing a user profile or submitting a post. There are only a few 404 errors because of threads which have been deleted. Besided that there are no crawl errors stated.
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At 1200 posts it should have equalized already. I would check to see that Google can crawl forum content properly - what if it cannot due to technical issue or perhaps need to login to see posts and replies?
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Hey, I think as the forum fills up with content, these words will be less and less important and as Dejan SEO mentions, these are likely to be noise words and ignored to some extent.
Concentrate on stimulating active, on topic discussion in the forum and you should be okay.
Cheers
Marcus -
The rankings remained the same since then... I just checked Webmaster Tools again and the keyword with the highest significance is "post"... Rreally really strange.
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Are you seeing any considerable changes in your rankings since forum went live?
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Hey Dejan, thanks for your reply. I'm thinking the same, but somehow Google doesn't. The forum is quite new but we have around 1200 posts which are all about the same "coffee machine" topic.
I really don't get why Google takes those "keywords" under consideration. The forum is installed under a subfolder "/forum". -
I see what you're saying I would be concerned too. Google is pretty good at figuring out what's a forum and what's main site content and will separate those two for different types of searches (though occasionally blending them). What I am saying is that your normal pages will rank for usual terms and your forum content for different type of search query. One thing strikes me though... is your forum empty? If not, then its topic should reflect the topic of the website - right? So that should not be a problem.
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