are Q2A pages negatively affecting the rest of the site SEO?

Question

I have a website with15-20 pages and I have attached Q2A forum in the menu (with 300+ pages).

Despite the website becoming older, I experienced some negative performance in google organic results.  So I thought to investigate it.

I go to google webmaster tools and I noticed the KEYWORDS of my website are not the ones I want, not the ones existing in the 15-20 pages of the main website.  Besides the very first keyword that is one of the desired, the rest are USELESS KEYWORDS that belong to the Q2A template.  This is from Webmaster tools ->  Content Keywords:

Email   63%
address 42%
verification 41%

When I click on those keywords google presents me a list of my q2a pages (indicating the keywords are found on those pages).  The word email is used more than 50 times in the code of one of the Q2A pages I checked.  Verification is also a very frequent word in Q2A code, that I do not use in my website.  It is strange that google considers a word that is part of the code only to be a valid webpage keyword.  But I am wondering if this hurts my SEO.

1) Is there a way to revert this?  These are completely useless keywords, irrelevant to my site.

2) Would it be a better practice to move the Q2A forum to a different domain and then link back to my main website from there?

Answer 1

CORRECTION:

After further investigation the keywords (email, address, verification etc) are not picked up from the code but from the REPLY FORM, from strings like:

"Your name to display (optional):"

"Email me at this address if a comment is added after mine:"

"Privacy: Your email address will only be used for sending these notifications."

"Anti-spam verification:"

It is very hard for me to believe that google can make such a mistake.  This situation is very common in all forums, website templates etc.

What are your comments and proposed solutions to this?

Answer 2

The Keywords you are getting are because a spammer is searching for his next target.As you mentioned they search for these keywords 

Your name to display (optional):"

"Email me at this address if a comment is added after mine:"

"Privacy: Your email address will only be used for sending these notifications."

"Anti-spam verification:"

I believe they search for these search terms because 99% Q2A webmaster never changes the default messages of Q2A. You can eve see some keywords like "Powered by Question2Answer" or "To see more, click for the full list of questions or popular tags."

There is a solution for this problem. Change these default lines by changing the sentence to something similar like, instead of " Powerd by Question2Answer" use " Proudly Running on Question2Answe".

Just change those sentances little bit, Hope this helps! Thank You.

Comments

So you are saying that webmaster tools is reporting the keywords that people are using to find my site?  Am I correct?  I thought that webmaster tools is scanning my page and collects the words(keywords) depending on their density.  >>>>>>You can eve see some keywords like "Powered by Question2Answer" or "To see more, click for the full list of questions or popular tags."<<<<<  NO, google does not report those.

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If you can visit webmaster tools again then visit and go to "SEARCH ANALYTICS" and what you are seeing is the list of keywords for which your site is ranking (Ohh yes Google does reports this!) and when you rank for these by-default keywords then mostly it is a spammer just building his list to spam!

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I did check webmaster tools -> search traffic -> sea4rch analytics as you said.  Absolutely nothing strange there.  Again, my problem is that the irrelevant keywords appear in webmaster tools -> google index -> content keywords.

Answer 3

The keywords reported by webmastertools have no weight for search relevance:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/ybXOdSdijhg