Keyword stuffing is one of the oldest spamming techniques on the Internet. I can’t believe some of the webmasters still use this technique although search engines can easily detect keyword stuffing. It has been used heavily in the past to obtain maximum search engine rankings and visibility for particular keywords or phrases. This method is completely outdated and does not add value to your content and rankings.
What Is Keyword Stuffing?
According to Wikipedia definition:
Keyword stuffing is considered to be an unethical search engine optimization (SEO) technique. Keyword stuffing occurs when a web page is loaded with keywords in the meta tags or in content. The repetition of words in meta tags may explain why many search engines no longer use these tags.
Google Doesn’t Like Keyword Stuffing
In particular, Google doesn’t like keyword stuffing. If Google detects it on a web page or website, it will be banned from Google’s index. And thus your web page or website will never be shown in the search engine results. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web-spam team, says:
Webmasters are free to do what they want on their own sites, but Google reserves the right to do what we think is best to maintain the relevance of our search results, and that includes taking action on keyword stuffing.
You Might Use Keyword Stuffing Without Knowing It
Although I know most of you don’t employ keyword stuffing and definitely know the consequences of spamming, but you might have use it without knowing it. For example, if you have very similar keywords that are used too often on your web pages, this might look like keyword stuffing.
There are a few common ways employing keyword stuffing. Here are some of them. Hiding text from visitors is the most popular techniques and it can be done in many different ways.
- Text colored to blend with the background
- CSS Z positioning to place text behind an image
- CSS absolute positioning to have the text placed far from the page center
- Noscript tags are another way to place hidden content within a page
How To Avoid Unintentional Keyword Stuffing
In order to avoid keyword stuffing, you should not use the techniques mentioned above. If you’re unsure if you use particular keywords too often on a web page, then you can use free tool to analyze keyword density in your website. Think about it, if a keyword density is 10%, it means the keyword appears once for every 10 words in the web page. This type of frequency is too high even for human being. You should try to keep your keyword density below 5% which is a more reasonable rate.
Conclusion
Spamming search engines is not a good idea. Although most of the new spam techniques will work for some time, but all of them will get your web page and website banned once search engines know about it. All of us should just focus on ethical search engine optimization tehcniques which will drive you long term traffic.
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Yea, I’ve read about keyword stuffing and how much the tech people are Google don’t like it
they will kick your site out of their results if they ever find you stuffing your site, previously indexed by Google bots, with keywords. I’ve stumbled upon keyword sites before and it’s pretty irritating because all you have is countless adverts flashing in your face and you searched high and low for the word you’re looking for. It was a problem back then but since Google implemented this policy, they’re more or less gone already.