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

[annej]

OK, here is my problem. I have a page titled "Enthusiast's Directory to Quilt History Sites". In reading some of the earlier threads about poison words it's mentioned that 'directory' is a bad word. Also resources and links were said to be poison. I need a good effective title for this page. It is the base of a several pages true directory that is more complete than any other in the field. It does not involve any trading of links whatsoever. It's an attempt to be a scholorly resource for any student or enthusists of the topic to be able to find what they need for their research.

Does anyone have ideas on how I could create a good clear title that would show searchers what it's about without using poison words?

Thanks for any help. I really want this directory to be one that is easily found in searches.

Anne

[ciml]

Anne, I don't remember seeing evidence of 'Directory' being a poison word in Google.

As madweb points out, 'guestbook' was a poison word, it's the only one that I've managed to identify. I begin to wonder if it is again?

[NFFC]

> guestbook was a poison word, it's the only one that I've managed to identify. I begin to wonder if it is again?

I just can't see how a word as common as guestbook would be penalised, there must be millions of pages that contain the word guestbook. If they are looking to filter out the guestbook sites then penalising just the word guestbook seems a pretty dumb thing to do. imho

[ciml]

Yep, my "I begin to wonder..." was due to not being able to reach dmoz.org for a while.

Google tried the filter for a month early last year, then it went back to normal.

Just having the word guestbook wasn't enough, but if the page was largely about the word guestbook (eg. title and body text) then it didn't pass PR.

Most guestbooks have many links and minimal PR, I guess that's why Google didn't keep the filter?

[annej]

Here is where I found the reference to poison words.

[searchengineworld.com...]

What are some new poison words?

Bookmarks, Links, Resources, Directory, Search Engine, Forum, BBS, in their singular and plural forms are known poison words.

[buckworks]

I would say that if a site includes a directory, call it what it is and make no apologies. If -- repeat IF -- "directory" is a poison word it can't be very toxic: The page I mentioned above that ranks #1, despite having "links" in the title, also has the word "directory" in a heading tag. The home page for that site has the word "directory" all over the place, and ranks #10 out of over five million results for its main target phrase.