List of poison words

What words or phrases are considered poison words?

[tejas_shah]

What words or what kind of words are considered poison words by Google?

Tejas

[docdanger47]

What exactly are "poison words"?

[korkus2000]

Poison words are words that would make the spider stop indexing the page or throw you into a filter like adult. I don't think we want to list the adult words here tejas_shah ;)

Adult words [webmasterworld.com]
Stop Words [webmasterworld.com]
Filter Words [webmasterworld.com]

[tejas_shah]

I did not mean for SEOs to list adult words.
I meant like, would word "credit" or "web site" considered a posion word?

Let me re-phrase my question.

What are the non-adult poison words?

Tejas

[sun818]

So, would the engines stop indexing if a proper name contained an adult word? Or part of a word would matches one of the adult words?

[takagi]

Known Google "poison words" [webmasterworld.com] is a one year old thread about poison words.

[JudgeJeffries]

I've got a non adult site that out of necessity uses phrases such as sex, rape, sexual assault and indecent assault.
Am I likely to have a problem and do these filters nail the whole site or just the offending page.

[xy123]

Can someone post a link(s) to lists of the actual poison words. Thanks.

[John_Creed]

Does Google filter out "adult" sites by default, or does one have to manually set it to "child safe"?

[carlr]

Wow! Now this is something interesting.
Can anyone sticky me the list of Adult / Stop / Filter words?

Thanks!

[rfgdxm1]

I can't think of any search engine worth mentioning that doesn't index sites based on "dirty" words. Might get you filtered if some "child friendly" filter option is chosen, though.

[icarus]

Interesting.. the thread mentioned by takagi is coming up PR0 - never seen that before on WebmasterWorld..

[carlr]

Does anybody have a list?
I searched in Google and Alltheweb - nothing

[Brett_Tabke]

He's not talking adult filters - he is talking "penalty" or "degrade" filters. The only word we could come up with back then was "poison".

Suspected poison kw's in links and page titles:
- links, tos, resources, contact, about, privacy, policy, help, search

[DVDBurning]

Having read all of the previous threads, article, and a few things outside of WW, I'm still not clear on the effect of these poison words.

If I have a link to "privacy policy" on my home page (with "Privacy Policy" as the anchor text), will this reduce the PageRank or SERP of this page? Or does it only cause the "privacy policy" page to have a very low real PageRank?

[xerxes]

I can certainly tell you from recent experience that the word "website" is a "poison" word. Does anyone know if "web design" are "poison words" please? I do not have a lot of choice. We design websites. After awhile, I realized there was a "block" on the word "website" but I thought I must have been wrong and I kept trying to get my site on page 1, like my other sites. I looked back into the old "Poison Word Forum" from 2000. Anyone have a list, please, of "poison words"? Thanks

[Brett_Tabke]

There are certain things you do to optimize a page to boost it's rankings. What we are suggesting is just the opposite - that there are certain things you do with keywords to degrade your rankings without knowing it. There is PR (off page), and then there is all the on-the-page criteria. We suggest that those kw's make defeat some of those otp criteria.

[BGumble]

>>Interesting.. the thread mentioned by takagi is coming up PR0 - never seen that before on WebmasterWorld..

No one else finds this strange? I see the same thing.. PR0 for a WW thread. What is the poison there?

[webmasterworld.com...]

[annej]

O Lordy, now we are going to have to get paranoid about poison words too? (sigh)

BTW I figured it was Google Guy's humorous comment that got the PR0. ;)

[tejas_shah]

>>Some commonly used description words you want to avoid. (new, fresh, updated, click, best, largest, cool, awesome, top.. I'm sure you can think of more and their derivatives)

Does any one know more of these poison words?

[rfgdxm1]

>Suspected poison kw's in links and page titles:
- links, tos, resources, contact, about, privacy, policy, help, search

I'd hope not "links". I have such a page titled that on my site, as do many others. All kinds of bad for Google to do so considering sites linking to each other is a key feature of their algo.

[fathom]

that's another thought process rfgdxm1.

Do you really want your "links" page appearing at #1.

One of the worst is "click here"... obviously that page would have something important on it but the "click" has nothing to do with the page topic.

In addition - Image links help to avoid the degrade effect.

[Brett_Tabke]

no no - no one is talking a pr hit here - this has nothing to do with pr itself. Just the suggestion that there are rankings boosts from quality kw optimization as well as ranking degrades as well.

>thread was pr0

Very interesting. First time I have ever seen that on this site.

[buckworks]

<<Suspected poison kw's in links and page titles:
- links, tos, resources, contact, about, privacy, policy, help, search >>

This does not match my experience and I'm skeptical about the whole idea of "poison words". Why would Google downgrade a page for including certain words if that's what the page is about?

One of my most profitable pages features the word "links" in the page title. It ranks #1 for its main target phrase (has been there for months) and several related phrases as well.

The home page of my newest site actually targets a phrase which includes "search". It includes the word "search" in the page title, in the description, the H1 tag, and in many inbound links (including those from Yahoo and DMOZ). In January when I launched it, the home page was #300-and-something for its main target phrase (out of 5.1 million results); it is now #20. I'll need to beat PR7's and up to rise further, but I'm happy with progress so far. I see nothing to indicate that Google is knocking off brownie points for emphasizing the word "search" , not just because of my own progress but also because of what I see on pages ranking ahead of me.

Even more important than the progress of the home page is that internal pages on that site are rising in the ranks for assorted target phrases. The word "search" is used prominently on internal pages too but if there's a negative effect from that I'm not perceiving it.

[madweb]

Any thread listing "poison" words contains a high incidence of "poison" words. Perhaps that is why some of the poison word threads have low PR.

e.g. What is the poison here? [webmasterworld.com...].... Perhaps it is this:

The same goes for many other pages using the word "guestbook" heavily; they just don't show in backlinks any more. "forum" and "links" seem OK, though. Anyone found any others?

Looking from a logical point of view, I would suggest that "links" and "guestbook" pages might have a difficult-to-pass-PR-penalty. The google guidelines specificaly instruct google not to exchange links for the sole purpose of increasing search rankings. The typical "links" pages are exactly that. Guestbooks have little relavance for normal search queries.

[edit-schoolboy errors]

[fathom]

This does not match my experience and I'm skeptical about the whole idea of "poison words". Why would Google downgrade a page for including certain words if that's what the page is about?

One of my most profitable pages features the word "links" in the page title. It ranks #1 for its main target phrase (has been there for months) and several related phrases as well.

buckworks the logical of the theory is quite sound and it's not suggesting that you can't rank well on Poison Words > "search engines" and optimization would in this case be results 0 which isn't the case.

This is more to do with index results integrity. First this isn't a singling out of one site's performance > it's all sites therefore everyone is at the same disadvantage.

What it stops is "out of content" stuff, as an example:

Ford > massive site 10,000 pages > places a link to a search function upper left corner from all pages call search and they have an engine performance page targeting "performance optimization".

In addition there could be many external links call engine optimization pointing to this page.

The total site would be highly relevant to "search", and:

Based on the 10,000 search links and the engine and optimization in the page title, and external links for engine optimization they could easily rank #1 for search engine optimization... whereby they are totally irrelevant for the searching users query... poor quality results... SE users go elsewhere.

Poison Words are not Bad Words they just may be not relevant to the play of word in search results... I doubt Ford would intentional spam for search engine optimization but this could occur unless the integrity of the archive is protected.

[pixel_juice]

>>Interesting.. the thread mentioned by takagi is coming up PR0 - never seen that before on WebmasterWorld..

So Googleguy was lying about 'Google R u l e z!' :(

/rushes off to edit sites... ;)

[xerxes]

One does not have to be too "skeptical" about Google's use of "poison words" if one has seen the beginning title tag keywords ignored totally while the ending tag keywords are given page one status.

[buckworks]

The example of Ford pages that happened to contain the words "search" and "engine optimization" would be fairly easy for Google to rank low for "search engine optimization" without assigning negative points for anything.

For starters, Google assesses the location of words and how they're used. The Ford page would be given some weight for including the words, but other pages would get the same plus more for using the words in a phrase that matched the word formation used by the searcher.

Google also looks at what other pages seem to be saying about a page. It's unlikely that anyone would link to the Ford pages using "search engine optimization" in the anchor text of their links. Even if some did it would be somewhat accidental ("search for engine optimization techniques"). On-topic pages would likely have a higher proportion of links which included the words, and would also be more likely to have an actual phrase phrase match. Ergo, more brownie points.

Google looks at lots of factors, but even those few would be enough for a page whose topic was "search engine optimization" to pull ahead of the Ford page which contained the same words for different reasons.

Note that "missing out on brownie points" is not at all the same as something being downgraded or penalized. Sometimes when people wonder if they've been penalized for something, I think the truth is more that they just haven't done enough things "right" compared to what other pages are doing.

I'm not completely dismissing the idea of "poison words", but I'm certainly questioning whether the words on Brett's list would be treated that way. It just doesn't match my experience.

[DVDBurning]

For the Ford example, Google would not find the phrase "search engine optimization" on Ford's pages. Although it might find the word "search", and the phrase "engine optimization" (really?), this would not be weighted nearly as heavily as other pages that include the full search phrase with all words together and in order.

There are certainly a lot of terms and phrases that mean one thing to one industry and another thing to a different industry. A "CD" can be a compact disc, a certificate of deposit, or a construction document. I think Google has done a terrific job at sorting this out. As long as searchers understand how to search using phrases instead of single words, they will generally find what they are looking for.