Keyword Stuffing

SEO Black Hat Techniques: What NOT to do

What is Keyword Stuffing?

Keyword stuffing is the practice of filling a web page with high numbers of irrelevant keywords, often randomly repeated, in an attempt to increase the site's ranking in the search results. Even keywords that make sense and are relevant, if repeated too often, count as keyword stuffing.

How does it work?

Search engines scan and count the words on a web page comparing the number of relevant words to others. If a number of key phrases are used a certain number of times, greater relevance is assigned to the page. This leads to a better ranking for that search phrase since the search engines deem this page highly relevant. However, this can only be done up to a point as having too many keywords on one page is not helpful to the reader and is considered to be spam.

What does it involve?

Keyword stuffing involves adding excessive amounts of keywords or phrases into the meta data or page text content, to produce (often meaningless) writing full of key phrases. Because of the abuse of this method of optimisation, some of the major search engines have ceased to use meta tags in their searches.

A number of techniques are used to hide keyword stuffing from visitors to the site, including colouring the text to match the background, placing the text behind a picture, or drawing it off the user-visible page.

What are the risks?

Keyword stuffing is still mistakenly used by some unscrupulous webmasters in order to try to manipulate search engine results, but it merely causes negative user experience and can harm your site's ranking. Modern search engines are designed to search for more than just written content and will easily recognise these blatant attempts at spamming. As copywriters, we sometimes receive requests for web content with a certain number of keyphrases per limited word count, and if this method is insisted upon we refuse the job.

What people don’t realise is that repeating several words too often may cause the site to actually be demoted or de-listed! Google in particular will do this, as they have an indexing algorithm which specifically lowers the ranking of any site stuffed with too many keywords.

What is the solution?

Overall, good informative copy written by a professional copywriter that uses keywords appropriately, and in context, will always yield higher dividends than keyword stuffing.