Unintentionally ranking for a keyword

[Beverly]

On my free movie blog, I often found that I would rank for a keyword not specifically being targeted, such as one of the tags or even a menu link. In some ways this could be a good thing. After all, if you have a keyword you want your site to rank for, you can't really be choosy if one page gets ranked unintentially when another that was purposefully optimized for the keyword did not. But, often changing the content on the page to reflect the keyword which the page ranked for actually made the page lose ranking. Anyway, it was just annoying and frustrating as it seemed Google preferred pages which accidentally referenced keywords rather than purposefully (and not talking about keyword spamming or any blackhat SEO tactics). It was just like if I made any active on page efforts to SEO a page it wouldn't rank but others which had no on page SEO would rank.

Has this happened to anyone else where you rank for a keyword on a page you did not want to rank on?

 

[Cz. Ervin]

Yes, actually one of my english websites is ranking for foreign keywords which are only somewhat relevant to my website (you can hardly beat that). I would say that you really don't have to stress yourself about this, and by no means should you put additional effort in changing the content on those pages. Go with the flow and put up new content instead, in the worse case you would get a bit increased bounce rate (and a few conversions).

 

[buysell-browse.com]

Foreign language keywords usually only achieve high ranking in the English based search engines. That is because the words are rarely encountered here. However, if you go to the foreign language country specific version of the search engine, your site will probably not rank as high or even not show up at all when searching for those words.