Let’s say your company name is Google and then after 17 years (and 28 days) you decide to change your name to Alphabet – just a theoretical name change. So you remove Google from all your home page and change it to Alphabet. Did you know that the home page can still rank for the word [Google] even if you removed that from your page?
John Mueller of Google said Google can still rank a page for a specific keyword, even if you remove that specific phrase or word from your page. John said on Twitter “If we know a text used to be on a page, we might continue to show the page even if the text has been removed.” John gave an example, “if a company changes its name, you’d still want to find the website if you searched for the old name.”
Here are those tweets:
Not really. If we know a text used to be on a page, we might continue to show the page even if the text has been removed. For example, if a company changes its name, you’d still want to find the website if you searched for the old name.
— ???? John ???? (@JohnMu) November 26, 2020
If it’s urgent, you’d need to remove the page completely. You can’t pick words that you don’t want your page to rank for. (Sometimes it’s worth being practical: are people really searching for the number? Does a page ranking for it mean anything to random users?)
— ???? John ???? (@JohnMu) November 26, 2020
If your company does something bad, keep that in mind.
Forum discussion at Twitter.