Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
It's the algorithm I'd worry about, not the manual review. With phrase based indexing, Google is certainly looking for natural patterns of usage and co-occurrence. I doubt that a keyword list would help as much as you'd like. On some pages, it most likely wouldn't help at all. But it probably won't hurt, unless it's a large list. Then you need to be careful. You're better off writing real sentences.
This discussion might be helpful...
Phrase Based Multiple Indexing and Keyword Co-Occurrence
[webmasterworld.com...]
Keyword Co-Occurrence...What it basically means, at the simplest level, is words or phrases that appear together. The patents go into detail about what's looked for, and statistics on co-occurrence patterns are used to relate clusters of terms/phrases into coherent "themes" and make predictions based on those statistics.
fairly short lists of keywords
Hmmm...I actually have quite a few pages with long widget industry keyword lists however they are lists of almost all known trade names for products within my widget industry.
<start mini rant>
They actually rank extremely well however trying to get my industry to tell me the real names for these widgets instead of their marketing obfuscation is another thing!
Deliberate marketing confusion I call it and it is most prevalent in the US for my widgets and it is one of my attempts to assist consumers to clarify their purchases.
</end mini rant>
I have my doubts if that's the actual question you are asking though?
I have a site which has a link on the information pages to a related keywords page. That page has anywhere from 10-100 keywords. Those pages rarely rank for the related terms.
Anecdotal evidence could therefore assume that the "value" of the list is estimated as part of the page as a whole. If it is mostly keyword lists with no real other content then it could be flagged.
Don't tag clouds all link out somewhere? Wouldn't they be treated differently from plain text keyword lists?
fairly short lists of keywords on pages instead of descriptive sentences
Tonearm - by "instead of" do you mean there will be no sentences on the page at all?
But it probably won't hurt, unless it's a large list.
do you mean there will be no sentences on the page at all?
Does this trigger anyone's alarm?
Yeah, writing sentences was a real bottleneck so I switched from descriptions to keywords. No sentences on real content pages at all now.
I feel this would present a bunch of problems algorithmically. Not spam exactly... just no substantial content. This kind of content might rank on extremely uncompetitive searches. I don't know how competitive you could go with this approach, because I haven't tried anything this sparse, but from what I'm seeing, Google is increasingly favoring richer text content.
On the other hand, if these are infrequently occurring product numbers and product types, the pages might do OK. I've seen lists rank all the time, but, again, not for anything remotely competitive.
When I said, "it depends on the rest of the page," I assumed there was some other text content and that this was just a search "enhancement." Even then, you'd be better off with actual sentences to give you some co-occurring vocabulary.
Yeah, writing sentences was a real bottleneck...
My personal recommendation is: Find a Way.
It took me a while (about a month, maybe more) to be able to do it with PHP, but I have long been glad I decided to figure out how to make it work!
It took me a while (about a month, maybe more) to be able to do it with PHP
Interesting, so complete sentences generated via a keyword list and a script?
Interesting, so complete sentences generated via a keyword list and a script?
Yes... It took me quite a bit of time to figure out how to do it, but I have been know to create 11,000+ unique paragraph descriptions form a database using PHP, and could do more if I felt or had the need.
Being able to generate unique paragraphs from a 'keyword list' is one of the 'feather's in my cap'... I highly recommend taking the time to figure it out! It's not easy, but possible...
The biggest hint I feel like posting here is: When you get to the point where you can describe the same thing (keyword) 3 or 4 different ways using a single sentence you are going in the right direction...
I have done this same thing JD with variable substitution, and a whole lot of testing, testing and testing live. works well.
Cool! And might I add... Testing, testing and more testing... (It sure is fun when it works though isn't it? Most of my testing has been live too... It seemed like the easiest way to determine effectiveness.)
Maintaining readability/ sense across syn swaps is not an easy task.
And then you have the identical POS patterns to contend with.
