What Are Trojan keywords And Why You Need To Beware Of Them?

Not so long ago, when affiliate marketers who would find a Trojan keyword that was getting a lot of hits, they would create and purchase a domain name with such Trojan keyword to bring traffic on their own site.

In the past, this method made affiliate marketers a lot of money.

However, today, as Google is becoming smarter by the minute, choosing those Trojan keywords purposely would be a big mistake and this post will explain you why.  But first, let’s make sure we all understand what a Trojan keyword is.

A Trojan keyword can be a broad word that has different meanings such as “pool”, “driver” or “bow”, for example; if you were to type such word in their search engine, Google would have to decide what word you are looking for.  Are you looking for a pool for your backward or are you looking for shooting pool?

A Trojan keyword is also a word or a name that searchers misspell.  For example, if you were to type tumbrl instead of tumblr or George Forman cookware instead of George Foreman cookware.  In such cases, your misspelled word would also be called a Trojan keyword.  Such typos were the kind of Trojan keywords that affiliate marketers used to love.

About a year ago when you’d realized that a misspelled word (Trojan keyword) had a lot of hits (traffic) all you had to do is create a site or page with such misspelled word as your main keyword and you’ll get quite a bit of traffic that way.

However, today, if you were to create a site with the keyword George Forman, instead of George Foreman, Google would automatically direct your search to sites that have the name spelled correctly and by-pass your Trojan keyword site.

This is the danger of creating domain names and articles based on Trojan keywords, nowadays.

The reason why Google won’t give you traffic to your Trojan keyword anymore is not that they are trying to penalize you, but their business is to help people find the best result for their search.  The best result would be the word or name correctly spelled.  Right?

Therefore, if I mistakenly type “Forman” instead of “Foreman” when I am looking for Foreman cookware, Google understands what I am looking for and will give me the sites that have the name correctly spelled.

This is just an example; it works the same way for any word that is misspelled or written with inverted letters or initials.

Do not confuse keyword stats, search results and PRB.

Keyword stats are showing you what keyword people are looking for.  However, it really is not showing how often that keyword will bring a certain webpage up in the search.  Keyword stats are what people type in the search engine which may include all kind of errors, misspellings and Trojan keywords.

Keyword results are what Google returns for such search and which can differ quite a bit from the stats.

PBR (phrase broad ratio) is how many times an exact keyword phrase is showing up in Google results without quotation.  In other words, if you did your keyword search only using quotation it could throw you off, because if your PBR is less than 15 to 20 percent, your keyword will most likely not be a good one.  As we all know, no one is searching a keyword using quotation.

I made that mistake many times when I first started messing around with keywords.  Some supposedly knowledgeable people would teach me to type my keyword phrase in quotation and if the result number was no greater than 300-500 it was a GREAT keyword.

The truth is that it’s only a Trojan keyword and, therefore, wouldn’t be worth it.

Just take those quotations out and look through the first two pages of your search; if you barely see the same exact phrase showing up on the results, most likely it’s not a good sign and all you have is just a Trojan keyword.

I found that out the hard way many times over, wondering why what was supposed to be a great keyword was bringing me zero traffic.

Trojan keywords are a trick of the past and it has been my any many other marketers’ experience that they don’t work anymore as Google is improving its search engines to be more and more efficient for the searchers.

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