Removing a word from the WMT relevant keywords list

[EasyDev]

Looking on the webmaster tools I have seen that one of the -most relevant- keywords recognized by the spider is “min.” that in my case stands for the abbreviation of the word minutes.

We are talking about a sort of table, and this words “min.” is indeed repeated a lot of times, in a lot of pages. The problem is that I want this keyword “out of the spider” since isn’t something remotely meaningful or related to my business.

So I’m thinking about the best option to remove it from the relevant keyword list of the Google webmaster tools, is see a couple of options:

1) Get it shorter (hoping that google will ingore it) changing the abbreviation “min.” with something shorter like “mn.” or even “m.”

2) Change the abbreviation “min.” with a jpg of a small clock…

Somebody also told me that there are other way to remove “unwanted” keywords…

How short must be a word, abbreviation to get ignored?
Which is the best practice in your opinion?

[goodroi]

Personally I would not be too fixated on one item in the relevant keyword list. When I see word(s) appear in the list that are not the best keywords to summarize my site I go back and try to add more content. I would prefer to add more keyword rich content than focus on how to take text away from a page. If that is not an option I would go with option 2 and use an image with a nice alt tag.

[EasyDev]

How short must be a word, abbreviation to get ignored?

[deadsea]

You are correct. That list is a list of words that you use on lots of pages on your site. Just because a word is there, it doesn't mean that you are likely to rank for it. And you can rank for keywords without having them on that list.

In our case, the list did make us realize that we were using generic terms more than we should. We said "product" a lot even though people were searching for "widget" and "thing-a-ma-bob". Based on this we revisited lots of copy to try to be more specific. I can't say that we saw a change in referral traffic because of it, but we were able to change which words appeared on the list.

Your plan to replace it with an icon of a clock would work. But I doubt it would have any effect on your Google referrals.

[lucy24]

How short must be a word, abbreviation to get ignored?

What does and does not get counted as a keyword is inscrutable, incalculable and beyond the ken of mere mortals. Et cetera, ad lib. Example: high on my own Keywords list is

:: drumroll ::

it's

With apostrophe. I am not making this up. Another good one is "new". With variant form "news", which you and I know is not the same word at all, but for some reason g### seems to think they go together. One new, two news, I guess. Also "soon". If you search for any one of those words, some lucky soul comes out on top. New Widgets, sure, I can see that. But who would ever search for the word "soon"?

[rlange]

deadsea wrote:
That list is a list of words that you use on lots of pages on your site. Just because a word is there, it doesn't mean that you are likely to rank for it. And you can rank for keywords without having them on that list.

This may be better asked in it's own thread, but... If that's true, then what useful purpose does that report serve?

--
Ryan

[lucy24]

what useful purpose does that report serve?

That's up to you. You may find it completely useless, and then you're free to ignore it. If you've got a big fat group of pages explaining the history of the foobar, "foobar" will show up at the top of your list. But it doesn't mean that g###'s computer has you tabbed as a "foobar site" when your main concern is widgets.

At least I hope it doesn't.

Now, if you don't have a big fat group of pages et cetera, but you still have an awful lot of "foobar", you may want to take a closer look at your site. Maybe you're laying too much stress on saying that foobars are better than widgets, or that you used to sell foobars but now it's strictly widgets. Then you might get a lot of foobar-seekers landing on your pages and not finding what they're looking for.

[MarvinH]

One of the top words on my list is the word "senior" as in "senior member". I run a technical forum. :-)