Completely wrong common words in GWT?

[Laralyn]

I have two different sites with two different domain names. One is older (by several years), and it seems to be indexed correctly by Google. I started the new site, generated a sitemap, and added it to Google about a week ago.

When I look at the keywords for the new site in the Google webmaster tools, the list is packed full of words... that have nothing to do with my site! They seem to be about cruises, sports, casinos, and various commercial and financial matters.

My original site has the correct words listed, so I don't think it's something my host is doing (the two sites share the same web server). My new site is a Wordpress blog, and there is nothing about casinos or gambling anywhere on the page, or in any linked sites (that I know of). I have Adsense and Amazon affiliate ads, but they are correctly targeting for my site.

What could cause all of the incorrect and none of the correct words to come up? I've looked at the source code both from WordPress and from "View Source" and there is nothing suspicious. I'm completely flabbergasted!

[edited by: tedster at 7:26 pm (utc) on Nov. 24, 2006]
[edit reason] remove specific keywords [/edit]

[tedster]

Clearly a bug in GWT, I'd say. If it doesn't clear up soon, you could write to them. But I'm guessing it's a reporting bug only, and not affecting how your urls actually rank -- or will rank. Unfortunately, this new domain is probably too new to look at search traffic yet.

[plasma]

Did you search G for these keywords?
Maybe you are really listed for them.
A friend of mine had a problem with his snipsnap blog where spammers created accounts and links for medical stuff. Now the blog ranks #1 for many drugs :)

[LunaC]

I found something strange with it, I just opened a new site and had only 1 link form another site of mine (related content, link text was the sites name) and in inbound link text according to sitemaps the word Luna was used.

Strange thing is that nowhere have I added it as a signature or linked it from anywhere that would know my most often used user name. (I tend to either use LunaC or Luna C)

Also in there were the works click, here and home.. again, none I had used in the site or linked to it with. And this was there right after opening the site. I still haven't really promoted it and most linkers seem to be using the site name, url or page's title as link text. No one knew about this site that knew me personally... A bit weird.

Big brother knows my name :o

[Mokita]

Laralyn

Is it possible that the domain for your new site was owned by someone else previously? Possibly the words in GWT relate to an older site.

Go to the internet archive: [archive.org...] and enter your domain name and see what shows up.

[Laralyn]

Ah ha! I went to [archive.org...] and the site from 2004 with my domain name has all of those keywords!

So will the Googlebot eventually re-crawl my site and decide that it has nothing to do with that old site?

Thanks for that tip--I would have never figured out why that was happening!

[vanessafox]

As Googlebot recrawls the site, you should see the common words table updated to reflect the new content.