that's what this tool said about the word "forum" in my meta tags. what exactly does that mean? should i not use the word forum?
Poison words, are words that are known to decrease your pages rankings if a search engine finds them in the title, description or in the url. They don't kill, they just bury pages in rankings. Generally, people think of adult words first. Adult words (obscene) often put your page in an adult category where it is filtered out by various filters at search engines. YOu can read some more here
Most of this stuff about so-called "poison keywords" is another good example of a Google myth. I first started seeing that nonsense about "forum" being a poison word several months ago but that's all it is -- nonsense. Try these: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2005-20,GGLG:en&q=seo+forums http://www.google.com/search?source...,GGLG:2005-20,GGLG:en&q=web+development+forum http://www.google.com/search?source...=GGLG,GGLG:2005-20,GGLG:en&q=web+design+forum http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2005-20,GGLG:en&q=seo+forum
I'm probably the least knowledgeable here on SEO matters but would think the keyword forum would be very relevant for some looking for a forum on a particular topic.
yes...that's often the first search I do when looking for an answer that is fleshed out....moderated. I had a problem with lack of support for a script and adding the word forum to the search is what first lead me to DigitalPoint...and the answer!