Official Google answers to common SEO questions

All questions with the tag “Keywords”:

	Question	Views
1.	Does Google use the "keywords" meta tag?	6,172
2.	Is over optimization bad for a website?	2,886
3.	Does the position of keywords in the URL have a significant impact. example.com/keyword/London is better than example.com/London/keyword ?	2,521
4.	Do tag clouds help or hinder SEO?	1,455
5.	In the search results, Google will often display a snippet appropriate to the specific search query – often disregarding the meta description. Is Google doing away with meta description use like they die with meta keywords?	1,426
6.	How would a photographer gain any significant PageRank for his or her site when the subject that really matters-images-has no anchor text?	1,298
7.	Can you think of any reason whatsoever to validate spending more than 5 minutes creating meta keywords?	1,237
8.	I have a client who was hacked. The SEO consultant said things were cleaned up, but they weren't correctly. All 30,000 viagra/cialis type and paid links have been removed, but no improvement in SERPs. We send reconsideration. What do we do now?	1,235
9.	Can you confirm if the Google SERPs are moving to AJAX, if so how do you think it will affect analytics which rely on the keyword information being in the URL?	1,221
10.	It seems that having relevant keywords in URLs is very helpful. Does Google give higher importance to keywords in the path vs. filename?	1,203
11.	A site for my client's competitor shows up on a SERP for keywords that never show up in the site anywhere (not even hidden in the source code). How is this even possible, and isn't this spam?	1,200
12.	What is the best way to check your own site for keyword rankings e.g. if I wanted to target a new phrase and wanted to check the progress of its ranking – what is the best way to check it?	1,185
13.	How much of a difference does the number of levels in the URL make?	1,172
14.	With a lot of my potential clients, the first words out of their mouth when building a site is "Can you make my site #1 on Google?	1,155
15.	An orphanage website I work on is showing up for searches on "girls in bathrooms" because they have an article about renovating the girls' bathroom! What do you think of the idea of a negative keyword meta tag to block irrelevant searches?	1,134
16.	As far as big brands go, why is it that they seem to do well regardless of relevance, content or links when analyzing keyword placement in search engine results pages?	1,133
17.	Are there any APIs available from Google to pullout reports from Google Webmaster Tools?	1,119
18.	I see so many people asking "Will this increase my PageRank?	1,102
19.	AdWords keyword tool gives an estimate of search traffic for a specific (or broad) keyword – How much (%) of this traffic do you believe are search marketers, SEOs, analysts and even business owners etc searching their own targeted keywords?	1,073
20.	Will Google ever offer (through Webmaster Tools or an API) a keyword ranking report similar to what Web Position and various other scrapers do?	1,028
21.	Is there a way to tell Google bots to exclude recurring words on a website such as "leave comment" or "print page" when indexing in order to improve the keyword density?	1,001
22.	I noticed that, for example, "Texas widget", and "widget Texas" return different results. I think the gist is the same but the results were different. I'd like to include both terms/phrases on my page but wouldn't that be considered keyword spamming?	1,000
23.	How come the search queries report in Webmaster Tools shows some keywords ranking and when we search them they are nowhere to be found?	890
24.	If you run a family friendly site which however now and then mentions an adult word (e.g. because the word is ambiguous or just happens to be about sex education etc.), do you risk getting kicked out of the Google SafeSearch results zone?	881
25.	Many corporate legal departments insist on using registered and trademark symbols on brand keywords in titles and on page. Does Google treat "brandname" and "brandname(R)" differently?	754

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