(Entry was posted by Ian MacLeod on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 12/20/2018).

Can certain keywords hurt other keywords?

We have some content on our website that has been there for many years. The content is essentially pages of free business letters that served to attract traffic to our site.Question: Are these free legal letters affecting the higher quality pages that we wish to be ranked for. Is it muddying the waters for the topics overall. Does the appearance of the word "free" in site structure, file names and keywords hurt us?

This question begins at 00:37:56 into the clip. Did this video clip play correctly? Watch this question on YouTube commencing at 00:37:56

Share on Twitter

Share on Facebook

YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Perry Bernard: You`ll only be able to determine this by seeing the the user your acquired that way has any conversion value - I`m betting they don`t. The other way to test in terms of organic would be to see how those pages contribute to crawl, how often googlebot hits them compared to other pages in your site, what their link structure looks like, how many organic search referrals they get that could hold commercial value and so on.
Michael Martinez: If the search engine is sending a lot of visitors to your free, non-converting pages THAT is a sign that your free, non-converting pages are a good resource and those pages would not, in any way, "harm" the rest of the site.