October 9, 2006 I’m really not sure where this information is coming from, but I’m getting a lot of clients asking me about poison words. This is an excellent example of a Google Myth. There are no such things as poison words. There are ‘stop’ words, but these don’t even have anything to do with your ranking as much as it does making good use of the space you have. I want to debunk this myth right now. There are tools and «experts» that say certain words in your title, description, or meta tags would get your site penalized by Google. These words include «lingerie,» «adult,» «sex,» «free,» and various school yard no no words. I’m not really sure where or why this myth started. Actually I think I do know why. Google is known for their lack of regard for porn and spammy sites. It’s not really that far-fetched to think that there would be trigger words that would mark a site as such material and ban it.

There is indeed a service provided by Google called SafeSearch, but it doesn’t really work in the fashion described above. This is a manual filter that can be used in an attempt to omit certain types of sites from appearing on a Google search result.

So, let’s get to the matter at hand. Google would not want to ban a site that contains the word(s) «lingerie,» «sexy,» or any variation as such. Think about the massive industry as lingerie sales in retail form. ‘Victoria’s Secret’ comes to mind. «Sex» is not exactly fair to target either, what with the ever-growing campaign for sex education and disease awareness that various organizations and government agencies that have been pushing for the last 30 years or so. «Adult,» well that’s just stupid. I could understand «free» as that is a word often used by spammers, but think of all the legitimate applications. Just too many to ban a word entirely. If you wanna test this yourself, do a search for «free lingerie» in Google. Check on the meta of all the sites on page one. I guess this post is coming to an end as I soon will be resting my case. I did mention «stop words.» Unlike poison words, these are words that a search engine like Google will ignore. Words like «and,» «for,» «the,» and words of the like. There is no penalty for including these in your meta. There is however a length to which your meta can exceed for less than satisfactory on-page optimization efforts. So it makes sense to be mindful of these words in order to conserve the space you are given for your meta.

In closing, everything written or told about SEO should not be believed. The search engines are often a mystery, and naturally, we as humans will think of fantastic reasons and subjects for this mystery.

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