Do search term extracters work for SEO?

[smithaa02]

You've probably seen these... You go to a site and at the bottom it lists say the top ten actual search terms used to get to that page.

My surprise was then when I did some test searches (for granted probably uncompetitive keywords) these 'innocent' search query reports on the top/best searches appeared to be the difference maker in getting that page ranked in google.

Anybody know what the trend is with these are and how effective they are?

On one hand it seems like a good idea...by making sure you have your bases covered with all these great keyword phrases eg (acme widgets, acmewidgets ohio, green acme widgets, acme widgets repair, etc...) your casting a big net. Plus most of the time these keyword phrases all link to an important subpage that I would assume get a lot of credit for these backlinks.

On the downside many of these keyword phrases are at the bottom of the page, duplicated across the website, in a non-verbose/non-sentencey format and are probably way overdoing their keyword density. I'm sure google's audit-bots would be going nuts seeing all these great keywords but lack of conjunctions, periods, commas and all that other great stuff that makes content look organic. Yet...there does seem to be some level of SEO success with this for many search queries.

Thoughts?

[edited by: tedster at 6:27 pm (utc) on Jun 3, 2011]

[tedster]

A couple things always come to mind for me when I see this on a page:

1. It adds no real value for the visitor
2. If it's true, then the page was already ranking for that term
3. If it's not true, then it's a cheap trick

I think that years ago there might have been some ranking pop for this kind of - well, I can only call it a trick. Today, I wouldn't even touch it. It's one step away from hidden text.

It also reminds me of a tag cloud, and those have really causing problems recently.

[smithaa02]

Yeah...seems fishy to me...maybe its more of a longtail trick.

But how would google know the difference between this and say a regular menu?

For all they know how you are just providing a convenient menu to your subpages whatever phrases are important.

Or...how would they tell the difference between this and a tag cloud?

[outland88]

Cutts has restated Google policies regarding this. He now says as long as these things relate to the content of the site they are not in violation. Plus he said that repetitive use of keywords is not necessarily keyword stuffing. The thing is there are seemingly dozens of older sites who are hammered by an over-optimization penalty for overuse of particular keywords where many newer sites quite clearly engaged in keyword stuffing and the mentioned are not.