Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What can I do to stop ranking for a keyword that has nothing to do with the companies website?
-
A website that we maintain keeps ranking for the keyword 'homeless shelter'. The company is UTILIS USA and they produce heavy duty shelters for military personnel. They have nothing to do with homeless shelters but continue to receive traffic concerning the phrase.
-
What do you call a porn-addicted Mozzer? A person with a lot of link juice.
Yeah, I heard Moz gets a lot of porn traffic. I also heard they get a lot of unauthorized backdoor entries.
Something something DDOS attack. Something something too many partners.
I'll be here all week, or until Moz bans me.
I'm sorry. I'll go back to spreadsheets.
-
Do you have the word homeless anywhere on your site? or even home?
-
I love the 'marketing angle' spin to this whole thing for the shelter structures. !! Great idea.
-
Addendum - I think I found the connection. I searched a combo of brand and keyword "utilis usa homeless shelter" and found these lovely results on page 1 in Google
https://www.chamberofcommerce.com/fort-walton-beach-fl/1158721-utilis-usa
http://www.hellodestin.com/local-businesses/utilis_usa/601399199/
http://www.citysearch.com/profile/601399199/fort_walton_bch_fl/utilis_usa.html
Page 2 has
http://oddpath.com/odd/?profile=601399199&name=
http://www.hotfrog.com/Products/Military-Shelters
Interestingly, the Hot Frog page is the category of "Military Shelters" but in the description of your various competitors in that arena - some list "Homeless Shelters".
Somewhere your company was listed under the local business of "homeless shelters" so this information is being propagated across various local listing sites such as above. Google scrapes this data and so is therefore associating you with that category. Looks like an effect of Hummingbird possibly making some of these connections as well.
I still stand by my "so what" statement above, but if you wanted to take action, you need to clean up your local citations. The Moz Local tool would be a place to start, but you can contact the above websites directly as well. I concur with Cyrus though, not sure if it is worth the effort.
Cheers!
-
There's a joke in there, but I'm going to let someone else tell it.
Cheers!
-
Are you sure this is not a personalization effect? I searched "homeless shelter" but did not see your website anywhere. I also ran it through the Moz rank checker and http://www.utilisusa.com/ is not ranked in the top 50 for "homeless shelter".
My bigger question is "so what?" If you sell a bunch of military grade soft-wall shelters to organizations that use them as homeless shelters, sounds like you have a new revenue stream. If anything, you could use it as a marketing angle. Donate some shelters to the Red Cross, show how your shelters made a difference in a recent disaster recovery. Sounds like some pretty awesome, durable structures if they can help people out of difficult situations.
-
It's quite common. Moz tends to receive a lot of traffic for "porn"
Go figure.
If it's not a lot of traffic and it's not causing too many problems, it may not be worth the effort of trying to "unrank" for the word. Otherwise by removing important keywords from you on-page elements you may inadvertently unrank for other important terms.
-
You do have "home" in the alt tag in a few places: alt="utilis-tents-navigation-home-button". This plus the shelter kw's may be enough to get indexed for that phrase. The alt on this page is useless, so try removing it.
-
Are there any links pointing to the page or domain containing homeless or is there word homeless on the page getting traffic?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Website ranking declined after connecting to CDN
Hi! We are trying to rank https://windowmart.ca for various local search terms. Our head office is in Edmonton where we try to rank https://windowmart.ca/edmonton-windows-doors/ for such terms as "windows Edmonton", "replacement windows Edmonton", "windows and doors Edmonton" as well as others. The website was the leader in its niche for around 2 years. Then we've got some server related issues, moved to a new server and connected CDN Nitropack that really improved our google speed test results. Recently we noticed that our rankings started to drop. Do you know if Nitropack can negatively effect local SEO rankings? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | vaskrupp0 -
Can an external firewall affect rankings?
For security reasons we are now routing traffic through an external firewall cum CDN. Our server and domain IPs remain the same, but any request is routed through an external IP, which then forwards the traffic. Would our rankings be affected because of IP changes? Thanks Sam
Technical SEO | | samgold0 -
How can I stop a tracking link from being indexed while still passing link equity?
I have a marketing campaign landing page and it uses a tracking URL to track clicks. The tracking links look something like this: http://this-is-the-origin-url.com/clkn/http/destination-url.com/ The problem is that Google is indexing these links as pages in the SERPs. Of course when they get indexed and then clicked, they show a 400 error because the /clkn/ link doesn't represent an actual page with content on it. The tracking link is set up to instantly 301 redirect to http://destination-url.com. Right now my dev team has blocked these links from crawlers by adding Disallow: /clkn/ in the robots.txt file, however, this blocks the flow of link equity to the destination page. How can I stop these links from being indexed without blocking the flow of link equity to the destination URL?
Technical SEO | | UnbounceVan0 -
Will Google crawl and rank our ReactJS website content?
We have 250+ products dynamically inserted and sorted on our site daily (more specifically our homepage... yes, it's a long page). Our dev team would like to explore rendering the page server-side using ReactJS. We currently use a CDN to cache all the content, which of course we would like to continue using. SO... will Google be able to crawl that content? We've read some articles with different ideas (including prerendering): http://andrewhfarmer.com/react-seo/
Technical SEO | | Jane.com
http://www.seoskeptic.com/json-ld-big-day-at-google/ If we were to only load the schema important to the page (like product title, image, price, description, etc.) from the server and then let the client render the remaining content (comments, suggested products, etc.), would that go against best practices? It seems like that might be seen as showing the googlebot 1 version and showing the site visitor a different (more complete) version.0 -
Google ranking my site abroad, how to stop?
Hi Mozzers, I have a UK based ecommerce site, that sells only to the UK. Over the last month Google has started ranking my site on foreign flavours of Google, so I keep getting traffic coming to my site from Europe, America and the far east that we could never sell to, and as a result bounce is going up and engagement is going down. They are definitely coming to the site from google searches that relate to my product type, but in regions I do not service. Is there a way to stop google doing this? I have the target set to UK in WMT, but is there anything else I can do? I worried about my UK ranking being damaged by an increasing overall bounce rate. Thanks
Technical SEO | | FDFPres0 -
Beating a keyword Domain
Has anyone here managed to beat a keyword/exact match domain to top spot? I am currently second and wondering if it is worth the time and effort to knock it off the top spot. How hard is it to get these very annoyingly favoured domains off 1st? Any help and advice much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Why is my website banned?
IMy website is Costume Machine at www.costumemachine.com . My site has been banned for 1 year now. I have requested that google reconsider my site 3 times without luck. The site is dynamic and basically pulls in feeds from affiliate sites. We have added over 1,500 pages of original content. The site has been running great since 2008 without any penalties. I don't think I got hit with any linking penalty. I cleaned up all questionable links last November when the penalty hit. Am I being hit with a "thin" site penalty? If that is the issue what is the best way to fix the problem?
Technical SEO | | tadden0 -
Can local SEO harm national rankings?
Today I met with a firm called Localeze that provides local directory submissions. I understand the importance of this service if your site is competing locally, however I'm not sure the effects of local SEO for a national brand. Our firm gets most of our traffic from across the country, not just one location, and our business is scattered (which is a good thing). We rank for service related keywords that are not tied to a location. We do not show up for local results so our business in our immediate location is weak. We would like to increase our local presence in search engines but I want to make sure that this will not take away from our national presence. Will optimizing a site for local search negatively affect general rankings? Thanks
Technical SEO | | KevinBloom1