The conversion rates are insanely low, but still more than enough to pay the bandwidth they eat, even if you’re not counting the intangible benefit of the brand exposure you get from the clicks.

The only reason I could see for excluding things is if you had some kind of self-hosted video or other bandwidth-intensive content that too many people were finding…but then again, the robots.txt file can accomplish that, too. It won’t let you filter by referring keyword, but that seems like a pretty rare need.

I suppose this would work for totally unrelated terms. So, I guess I’m asking if anyone has a really good example of where this might work in organic results.

Regarding the quality of search – internet marketers should be concerned with that. If the overall quality of search degrades in a search engine, the use of that search engine declines and then your traffic dries up too. No, we’re in it for the long haul for all of our clients. We want long term sustainable results that grow their business with as little risk as possible

I’ll take that traffic all day, every day. Even if you get ten visitors a month for a “worthless” term, and you convert at 1% (if your sales page is any good, you’d hope to), that’s one extra sale a year, which cost you absolutely nothing.

That would be a bit like asking customers at the door to your bricks and mortar business, as they approached your doors:

“Excuse me sir, are you intending on buying anything today?”

to which they reply:

“I don’t think so, I’m just at the browsing stage”

and you go on to say:

“Sorry sir, you’ll have to leave, we only allow people ready to purchase into our store”

It’s just bad business sense to turn away, or turn down *any* potential customers, whether they’re ready to buy, or just browsing.

@ Chris – the point you made at the end of your post about improving the quality of the search experience for everybody is interesting. I’m not sure you’ll find too many internet marketers interested in improving the overall search experience. I know for one that if I could grab the top ten spots in google for a competitive term and funnel all clicks to a single site, I’d do it.

Search experience be damned!

I think that there’s a distinct difference between PPC and organic search in this context.

The reason you want to target quality, qualified traffic using negative keywords in your PPC campaign is that you’re paying for your clicks, so you don’t want to be paying for clicks that are unlikely to result in a conversion.

With organic SEO, it can quite often be a numbers game. Even thouugh the prospect came to your site via a low quality search term, they may still convert. Why would you forego this opportunity by using negative keywords to stop people coming to your site? As it’s organic traffic, it’s not costing you anything, so the visitor is free anyway.

Even if you’re getting a 10% conversion with your PPC campaign, 5% with your organic SEO, and 1% from organic SEO with the keywords you’re thinking about removing via your webmaster tools, that 1% is still worth getting, as it didn’t cost you anything.

$0.02 please!