Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO technique used by webmasters to boost a website’s organic search engine ranking. Webmasters “stuff keywords” by ensuring the same keywords appear on a webpage excessive number of times where user experience is usually sacrificed. Keyword stuffing is completely outdated and adds no value to a website’s search engine rankings today.

Keyword Stuffing Definitions

Wikipedia defines keyword stuffing as:

An unethical search engine optimization (SEO) technique.

Google officially defines keyword stuffing as:

The practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results.

Do a Google web search on “Keyword Stuffing” and Google Wonder Wheel tool relates “Keyword Stuffing” to:

  • Keyword Stuffing Example
  • Keyword Stuffing Search Engines
  • Keyword Density
  • Keyword Stuffing Limit
  • Check Keyword Stuffing
  • Keyword Stuffing Webmaster Help Center
  • Black Hat SEO
  • Inbound Links
    Terms Related to Keyword Stuffing

Google’s Related Searches shows keyword stuffing relates to:

  • Keyword spamming
  • Spamdexing
  • Link farms
  • Link Baiting
  • Doorway Pages

Keyword Stuffing Techniques

Keyword stuffing’s purpose is to increase the keyword density of a webpage. Keyword density is the number of occurrences that a given keyword appears on a web page. The more times a keyword appears on a page, the more weight the keyword is given by the search engines when a search query matches keyword.

The black hat SEO techniques of keyword stuffing include:

  • Placing repeated keywords in the body of a webpage where readability and the meaning of the content are neglected.
  • Hiding keywords on a webpage by making the text the same color as the background.
  • Stuffing keywords in META keywords tags or in comment tags.
  • Over-filling image alt tags with long strings of keywords.
  • Placing keywords in cascade style sheet (CSS).
  • Filling keywords in noscript tags.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Google and other major search engines today no longer gives good rankings to pages employing keyword stuffing techniques.

  • Google’s Matt Cutts insists avoiding keyword stuffing.
  • SEO Black Hat explains how search engine detects keyword stuffing techniques.

As over-optimizing your webpages’ keyword density can backfire, focus on white hat search engine optimization techniques by reviewing Google SEO for Beginners and Google SEO Starter Guide.

Web Page Content, User Experience, Related Keyword Research

Keyword stuffing is strongly discouraged as this method:

  • Detracts the readability and usability of your web pages.
  • Creates negative user experience and high web analytics bounce rate to your site.

When creating website content, focus on user experience by creating useful and informative content that uses keywords in context and without repeating the same keywords excessively. Use keywords that are highly related to the core keywords of your web pages. Use keyword research tools to find the related keywords:

For Chinese keywords, use:

Comments

One Response to “Keyword Stuffing”

  1. Tweets that mention Keyword Stuffing -- Topsy.com on May 27th, 2010 4:43 pm

    [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Leila Davies, Gordon Choi. Gordon Choi said: PPC Blog: Keyword Stuffing – http://tinyurl.com/33xzwn9 [...]

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