Can you robots.txt or disavow one keyword?

[cmendla]

I was looking at Google Webmaster Tools for a particular site. The #8 keyword was 'toggle'. That keyword has NOTHING to do with the site's content.

This was a direct result of an online catalog we have where the software generates images to toggle the view. It is an alt="toggle" tag in the link.

This content of the catalog IS related to the site (it is from a library they have of reference materials on the industry).

I have a question out on the software publisher's extension as to if they can fix this.

My questions.

1. Is there any way to exclude ONE keyword from google's indexing? I don't think there is but figured it wouldn't hurt to ask.
2. If there isn't a way to exclude one keyword, then I have to decide if I should robot.txt out that whole area. Fortunately the site structure should allow me to do that. So, is it worth excluding a database of potentially useful data if having that indexed is also causing a crazy keyword to index?


thanks

chris

[JD_Toims]

1. No
2. No

I know I probably "let out frustration" with WMT a bit too much, but for the most part and for most webmasters it's just plain confusing and not very helpful, often due in a large part to the wording of things.

For instance, rather than "Did you know these URLs generate a 404/410 error?", they're listed as "crawl errors", which nearly everyone I've seen post here interprets as "Oh, I've gotta fix this," rather than being able to look and say "Yes, I know... Those pages don't really exist, so I'm glad you got a 404/410."

This is the same type of issue -- What you're describing is an "overly simplistic" keyword density tool that takes into account the alt attribute. If you really want it to be fixed in WMT, then don't try to exclude anything or delete content, change the alt="blah" to title="blah", but imo and ime you really don't need to do that, because WNT reports the "basics" of keyword density including alt attribute text, but doesn't report what a page's topic is determined to be by the algo, which means what you're seeing in WMT is a "wild goose chase creator" rather than a "helpful tool."

Personally, I wouldn't change anything, but if someone insisted I "clean up the report shown in WMT" I would change alt="toggle" to title="toggle" for the benefit of screen readers since titles are not reported in WMT, even though it is not likely to affect rankings at all, because the algo's version of "determined page topicality" is much more sophisticated than the [often] misleading information provided in WMT.