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You are here: Home / Google / Google Removing “Content Keywords” from Search Console

Google Removing “Content Keywords” from Search Console

November 29, 2016 at 5:05 am PST By Jennifer Slegg

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google-content-keywords-removedGoogle will be removing the “Content Keywords” section from Google Search Console, removing Google’s tracking of the keywords they see as most popular on your pages and site overall.

Content Keywords is a combined report that lists the most common keywords within a site, including variants, and reports it within Search Console.  This feature will be removed by Google, although you can still currently see it in your account.

I can see why Google is doing this.  Most of the questions about this seemed to be around those whose sites had been hacked and were suddenly showing a ton of wrong content keywords.  While this was sometimes one of the ways that you could use to see whether a site had been hacked or not, the fact those hacked keywords stuck around for quite some time in the Content Keywords meant that people incorrectly thought it would hurt their rankings if Google showed all those random hacked keywords.

Some SEOs also use it to gauge what Google sees as the most important keywords for a site, particularly on a very large or overly complex site that has many different focuses.

Here is how the report looks now:

google-content-keywords-removal

Google suggests that site owners use the Fetch as Googlebot to verify keywords on a page or to use Search Analytics to check for keywords that are bringing searchers to the site.

Google doesn’t say when exactly it will be removed, but I imagine it will be pretty quickly.  So if you want a copy of your keywords, you should download them ASAP.

UPDATE: And it’s gone…

google-content-keywords-removal2

UPDATE 2: Google has a blog post about the removal.

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post
Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.
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Latest posts by Jennifer Slegg (see all)

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Comments

  1. Neeraj Pandey says

    November 29, 2016 at 5:34 am

    Jenni, the point is that if google removes this feature, how will we know that our web page/site isn’t hacked?

    • Jennifer Slegg says

      November 29, 2016 at 7:04 am

      These days it is rare that Content Keywords would be the first place you’d notice a site has been hacked.

    • Jennifer Slegg says

      November 29, 2016 at 9:42 am

      These days it is rare that Content Keywords would be the first place you’d notice a site has been hacked. But people can also easily do a “site:example.com spammy keywords” which would show hacking way sooner than it would have ever shown up in Content Keywords.

  2. Zeshan says

    November 29, 2016 at 7:03 am

    Yeah, it’s gone. Found in my SC as well. Although it wasn’t giving any huge benefits. Thanks John and jennifer quick update. 🙂

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