Do poison words exist?

[smithaa02]

One of the site I inherited is a forum with poor spam control...I get a lot of parasite links on this forum with garbage content. Obviously this has me a little concerned.

Aside from the links, can certain poison words hurt a site in the rankings? If so, which ones? Swear words? Pharma terms? As long as these poison words don't appear in my url or header, am I ok?

Anybody have experience with a site that dipped in the rankings after featuring poison words?

[tedster]

If they appear in outbound links pointing to spammy sites, you're definitely not OK. I wouldn't say there are any particular "poison" words today. It's any words that are way off topic for the site, especially if they appear frequently.

[tangor]

If inherited the question is do you have editorial right, and if you do, are you willing to do it?

As for "poison words" pick and choose which sub-set of humanity with a chip on their shoulder will be offended as to what is "poison".

[lucy24]

Swear words? Pharma terms?

That's two different categories with two different potential consequences.

Use the wrong vocabulary, and the whole site may be off limits to anyone using "family friendly" filtering. (Quick detour: In google, image filtering is on by default. Language filtering is a different mouseclick. I assume there's a list somewhere of the Seven Words You Can't Say On Google.)

Concurrently you have to assume that search engines have warning lights that come on in response to certain words. Probably the same words that send e-mail straight into your Junk bin. If every other word in a post is "Viagra", the forum had better be devoted to the role of pharmaceuticals in geriatric medicine. That kind of thing.

More nebulously: some words will probably trigger "personalization", either positively or negatively. ("If you show me another page about widgets I'm changing to a different search engine.") But good luck trying to separate the spam posts from real people's natural vocabulary.

[deadsea]

Using the word "search" in page titles is poison. We lost a lot of traffic when we tried that.