Google Webmaster Central Blog - Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index

Post-Halloween Treat: New Keywords User Interface!

Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 12:37 AM

Our team had an awesome Halloween and we hope you did too. Yes, the picture below is our team; we take our Halloween costumes pretty seriously. :)


As a post-Halloween treat, we're happy to announce a brand new user interface for our Keywords feature. We'll now be updating the data daily, providing details on how often we found a specific keyword, and displaying a handful of URLs that contain a specific keyword. The significance column compares the frequency of a keyword to the frequency of the most popular keyword on your site. When you click on a keyword to view more details, you will get a list of up to 10 URLs which contain that keyword.

This will be really useful when you re-implement your site on a new technology framework, or need to identify which URLs may have been hacked. For example, if you start noticing your site appearing in search results for terms totally unrelated to your website (for example, "Viagra" or "casino"), you can use this feature to find those keywords and identify the pages that contain them. This will enable you to eliminate any hacked content quickly.

Let us know what you think!
The comments you read here belong only to the person who posted them. We do, however, reserve the right to remove off-topic comments.

45 comments:

Sam Diener said...

WHOA!!!!! ::drops hot chocolate::

Sam Diener said...

Question though: I am still seeing keywords from pages google should have removed from its index (remove pages tool said they did). What might be going on there....

Sam

John Mueller said...

@Sam For technical reasons you'll probably still see those keywords for a bit, until the removed pages are completely flushed out of the system.

Sam Diener said...

thanks john... So just to verify: There is no cached copy of the pages that I have deleted from the index that could or would exist and impact these keywords in the future...?

Otherwise, do I need to manually removed cached versions?

Great addition guys. This is going to be huge for the SEOs.

John Mueller said...

@Sam If you removed the pages using the URL removal tool then you're all set and just need to wait for the other tools to catch up (drop those keywords, etc).

Amit Sharma said...

Nice one - definitely a more helpful tool than the previous version. Still to explore what benefits it will eventually deliver!

rasec said...

It's really usefull, thank you!
Now i have all the information i need to improve my site, in terms of keywords at least.

Thank's again.

john said...

A great tool
launched on rememberence day here in australia
Its sure a tool to remember

yonitg said...

This is a great tool, thanks for adding that!!!
i can see i have more work to do on my site in terms of keywords.

Yonit

latma said...

I don't like the fact that to see the whole list I need to press Show more keywords... so many times

Tina said...

Strange words are occuring in my list such as "searchword1, searchword2, searchword3, word123"

DataPlus - Custom Data Services said...

Very nice feature.

RobBothan said...

Nice additions, pity you have to go to actual URLs rather than the dropdown on the old one.
Q. Seems it focuses on Singular keywords and doesnt allow phrases? ie "Holidays" not "Cheap Holidays" ?

Edmonton SEO said...

I really like the keyword density tool in webmaster tools. It made me realize just how much plugins like Sociable for Wordpress were negatively effecting my blogs with words like Facebook, Twitter, RSS etc being in the top 20 most influential key words. The real question is what are we going to be able to do with out being overly spammy duplicate wording/snynonyms to keep the LSI pertinent? Is there any chance of a tag like no follow for content in the near future for indexing certain content on the page? I'm not sure how this would be done properly with out spammers taking advantage

Sahabat said...

Great, but I don't know where I can find it...(soryy I'm a newbie...)

Sahabat said...

I've found it.....

The Crazyhorse said...

I have just known this site. It maybe helpful to me. I will keep reading it! Thanks!

furby said...

My website stompmusicstudios.com has no keywords in the list. At the very least the words that appear all over my pages like "music studio" and "music lessons" should appear. Can you point me in the right direction? Thanks.

Risma2006 said...

Yeah, I love it.

searchengineman said...

Great tool, Keep up the good work
Searchengineman

Faisal said...

Hi:

I really got valuable information but want to know how to remove those irrelevant keywords?

Deric Loh said...

Finally a useful hint on how relevant our site's content is to the onsite visitors. Time to rethink our strategy, are we actually targeting the right site visitors or are we not ?

Diana said...

Great feature .... thanks guys

Reno said...

The interesting article. Your blog give me many an understanding about your blog topic. I'm waiting for next your article

AccuraCast said...

Nice one! Thank you for this new functionality - most helpful

compupodia said...

          I am still getting keywords from a deleted post page on Sep 17, 2009.
          The URL is
http://compupodia.blogspot.com/2009/08/installing-microsoft-windows-xp-from.html

san said...

Finding this really cool, except it shows up keywords such as 'forum', logged, etc.

Agree with another commenter that it would be helpful if we could see keyphrases and not just single words.

Mayur Ghatkar said...

@san

          Google count relevance of single keywords in query and then use AND operation on it to determine which document to list first.

          Another problem with my webmaster account. I had 26 back links in 'Links to your site' page. Today it is showing 68 with many of them from single website http://filchiprogrammer.wordpress.com
          I doubt if this has anything to do with this feature or google may have messed something while releasing new feature. Can anyone answer this?

Hank said...

GOOGLE is an LSD trip (so it would seem) when it comes to getting an ACTUAL Answer to a question. Google is the information provider to the world, but when it comes the actual human beans when they require a personal touch it's more ridiculous than going to the Emerald City to the Wizard of Oz to get a question answered!!

Where are the goddamn sports scores, my iGoogle isn't upto date for games over hourse ago! I am a serious sports fan, but not a gambler, so whats wrong with wanting to look on one's Google desktop for scores?????!!!!!

Jeffrie said...

I have used the tool and it's great. It has many features and easy to use. Thank you.

Sam Diener said...

hmmmm -- still isn't working though....

Martin55577 said...

Hi,

I propose just only one thing - this clicking to show new keywords are really annoying..maybe excel will be better :)

Alex K said...

I am getting tags (div, param, src, 1em, margin....) as keywords from my http://***.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

autodude said...

Spencer from
http://autorepairsavings.blogspot.com/
asks how do you add keywords to a blog? Thanks

sandwich said...

is very informative. The article is very professionally written. I enjoy reading

Gus said...

Here's an idea from the top 20 charts. Add a 'previous position' column (+10, -6, etc.) so its easy to see your movers and shakers!

giordano said...

Me too I am having html tags and (class) attributes as top keywords: div, field, class: why?

sukiminna said...

a question: can i remove irrelevant keywords detected on my site?

Because i'm getting lots of html tags as keywords such as div,span,style

Dick said...

Kurt, Tanya, and Sagar, this is ridiculous: you consider the words website, web and site as common words and therefore they are automatically ignored. There are many complaints about this, particularly from webmasters who are using those words as their main keywords. I consider this as a "deliberate bug" in WMT. When are you going to correct this terrible mistake? I hope asap. Thanks in advance!

RocknRolli said...

Is this feature already rolled out in Germany?

SQLServerStudio said...

It's a nice feature - I am using it when I write new post so - I always take help from this features

Kalomegh said...

thanks john... So just to verify: There is no cached copy of the pages that I have deleted from the index that could or would exist and impact these keywords in the future...?

GolfTeacher said...

I am interested in searches on phrases not just singular words. How can I set up a "keyword phrase" to be reported in Google webmaster tools? And how can I have Google searches return my site for searches on a phrase?

Keith said...

I really like the ability to see the index words but it would be really nice to see if the word is being ignored by Google and be able to set an override so that words like "Search" could be excluded as it appears in a search box on every page on the website, but if my site was for a "Search Engine" I want to include it for my site (I don't have a search engine on my site but the word search does appear all over my site and I want to know it is not a main search term or be allowed to remove it).

Google Webmaster Central said...

Hi everyone,

Since over a year has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Central Help Forum.

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The Webmaster Central Team