Google 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 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…

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