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I am using Bootstrap for an accessible website in German.

A German navigation word for screen readers gets listed by Google Webmaster Tools as an relatively important content keyword: «Umklappen». This means «toggle». This navigation element near the sandwich menu icon appears on every page of the website, so Google seems to think this is an important word, but it is not.

The code relevant to the question:

<div class="navbar-header">
  <button type="button" class="navbar-toggle"
    data-toggle="collapse" data-target="#topnav"
  >
    <span class="sr-only">Umklappen</span>
    <span class="icon-bar"></span>
    <span class="icon-bar"></span>
    <span class="icon-bar"></span>
  </button>

The class sr-only is for screenreaders, see: What is sr-only in Bootstrap 3?.

How to tell search engines that «Umklappen» is not a content keyword?

An idea would be to split the word with <wbr>, however this also disables screenreaders forcing them to spell U-M-K-L-A-P-P-E-N I think.

Note! It's not a duplicate of How to remove page element from search results / keywords? because some suggestions won't work for screenreaders. I can't assume that screenreaders understand JavaScript.

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nalply
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1 Answers1

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I wouldnt worry about it, content keywords is just a frequency count.

https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq--webmaster-tools#strange-words2

Q: Why do my Webmaster Tools stats show common phrases such as "buy now" that are not directly related to my site? A: While some common words and phrases are filtered by Webmaster Tools, there may be some that you use which are not. Having these words or phrases listed in your Webmaster Tools account does not mean that our algorithms will view your site as being only relevant for those keywords. While Webmaster Tools mostly counts the occurences of words on your site, our web-search algorithms use well over 200 other factors for crawling, indexing and ranking. In other words: don't worry if you see keywords like this listed in your Webmaster Tools account.

Keep in mind that this data may take some time to be updated (Googlebot needs to recrawl your pages). Also, since all content from your pages are used for this data, it's possible that it also contains words and phrases like "buy now" which may not be that relevant to your site on a whole.

user29671
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