12/6/2008
Keyword Stuffing: A Questionable SEO Tactic
If using a keyword (or key phrase) a few times in our web copy is good for our website’s SEO, shouldn’t using that word or phrase more often be even better? Haven’t we always been told that the more keyword rich our copy, the higher our content will rank in search results? Isn’t that a given in today’s search-engine driven cyberworld? Yes and no.
We should certainly use enough repetitions of our main keywords to demonstrate their importance to search spiders. Yet, placing an excessive number of keywords into our web copy or elsewhere on our web page can actually lower our search engine ranking instead of raising it.
This practice, commonly known as “keyword stuffing,” often causes search engines to penalize our websites – or in some cases ban our keyword-stuffed content entirely from search results – for attempting to artificially inflate our search engine rankings, rather than creating truly relevant content that will rise to the top of search results naturally.
The Google Webmaster’s and Site owners Help page offers the following advice on this important SEO topic:
“Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.
Some specific keyword stuffing practices frowned upon by Google are:
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using hidden text (text that matches the color of your web page or is placed behind an image or into your site’s meta tags, making it invisible to the reader)
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creating lists of keywords or displaying paragraphs of randomly repeated, out-of-context keywords
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placing keywords on your web page but setting the font size to 0
Questionable SEO practices such as the above display one thing to the reader and another to the search engine, making the search engine “distrust” the site.
Search engines have become more sophisticated than they once were and are now programmed to catch many of the questionable tactics that previously gave certain sites an unfair advantage over their more honest competitors.
Barry Wise has stated, in Keyword Stuffing: Google vs. Yahoo’s Treatment of Keywords:
If you read your website’s content to yourself and you get tired of reading the same word over and over again, then you’ve overused it. It’s pretty much that simple; write your site content for humans, not for search engines. As long as you’ve done a reasonably good job writing content for humans Google’s not going to penalize you.
Read the rest of Barry’s post, linked to above, to learn more about ethical SEO practices. You might also find it helpful to scan this Webopedia explanation of How Web Search Engines Work.
