Weekly Spam Edition 4
What significance does this have for SEO and what can you learn from it?
The content keywords list in Google Search Console (refer image) is an indicator of how Google has chunked your content into taxonomies. The specific taxonomy here is individual keyword roots, rather than phrases, so while it possibly doesn’t give you any clear insights into multiple-keyword phrase use in your website, it should give a clear indication of the theme of your content. So, a website about plumbing services might have words like “plumber” (3 variants) near the top of the list. This image is from my website, which has “Google” as the number one used word in my content, and exists as 3 variants: “Google”, “google’s” and “googling”
To access your Google Search Console – Content Keywords section, your website must have a Google account and your property must be verified.
About the Content Keywords list:
The list shows the current ‘archived’ status of your keywords. This means that it shows the current state to which Google has processed your content. Due to crawling and chunking factors, it doesn’t necessarily show what is actually in your website right now. If you haven’t added any content to your website for a few months it’s likely to be fairly accurate but if you keep adding content regularly like I do, then this list is just a snapshot from some time in the near past.
The list shows mostly linguistically open word classes, meaning: word set that are regularly added to during the evolution of language. This refers to word types like Nouns, Verbs and Adjectives. It usually skips words from closed sets like Prepositions, Conjunctions, Determiners etc, or low growth sets like Adverbs. Some of these are commonly referred to in website-related context as ‘stop words’. This is because the open sets are the ones that carry the greatest influence on the determination of meaning and exist in far greater variety. If you have a WordPress website, you may have noticed that when you write a new page or post for your site and are using ‘post name’ as the permalink structure, the ‘stop words’ are commonly removed from the slug automatically and your resulting page URL reads more like a newspaper headline.
The rest of this article discusses the following points:
How do you use this data?
What do we learn from this list?
Using this list to spot potential problems:
What else can the Content Keyword list show us?
Read the original article in full here.
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