What is Keyword Stuffing ?
January 28th, 2008Keyword stuffing was 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.
Keyword stuffing had been used in the past to obtain maximum search engine ranking and visibility for particular phrases. This method is completely outdated and adds no value to rankings today. In particular, Google no longer gives good rankings to pages employing this technique.
Hiding text out of view of the visitor is done in many different ways. Text colored to blend with the background, CSS “Z” positioning to place text “behind” an image – and therefore out of view of the visitor – and CSS absolute positioning to have the text positioned far from the page center, are all common techniques. As of 2005, some of these invisible text techniques can be detected by major search engines.
“Noscript” tags are another way to place hidden content within a page. While they are a valid optimization method for displaying an alternative representation of scripted content, they may be abused, since search engines may index content that is invisible to most visitors.
Inserted text sometimes includes words that are frequently searched (such as “sex”), even if those terms bear little connection to the content of a page, in order to attract traffic to advert-driven pages.
In the past, Keyword stuffing was considered to be either a white hat or a black hat tactic, depending on the context of the technique, and the opinion of the person judging it. While a great deal of keyword stuffing was employed to aid in spamdexing, which is of little benefit to the user, keyword stuffing in certain circumstances was not intended to skew results in a deceptive manner. Whether the term carries a pejorative or neutral connotation is dependent on whether the practice is used to pollute the results with pages of little relevance, or to direct traffic to a page of relevance that would have otherwise been de-emphasized due to the search engine’s inability to interpret and understand related ideas. This is no longer the case. Search engines now employ themed, related keyword techniques to interpret the intent of the content on a page.
Keyword stuffing
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Where to Place Keywords
It is important to stuff your keyword into the title, headings, image alt statements, hyperlinks on the page, hyperlinks pointing to the page and in your general keyword rich text.
How to: Keyword Stuffing
General techniques for keyword stuffing are to use invisible text, the hidden input tag, or back in the day people would duplicate tags or repeat the same word over and over again in the meta keyword tag.
Some people also use the keywords way too often in the visible page copy to where the page reads horrible.
Why Keyword Stuffing is Bad
Using a keyword over and over again, the keyword becomes more and more targeted until it is too rich in density. The page may trip a spam filter or sound goofy to readers…either way the page will not convert.
Search engines such as Yahoo! actively edit their search results. If you are caught keyword stuffing by an editor or competitor your site might get banned. Read More About keyword stuffing>>
Average Keyword Saturation for Google, MSN and Yahoo
When deciding upon keyword placement we all try to get the most out of our target keywords saturation. In the same time no one wants to get penalized by accidentally inserting too many keywords in the page copy, or by including too many words between H1 tags. Since search engines would never publish the exact numbers for maximally alowed keyword frequency or keyword prominence, all we can do is just study top pages in SEPRs and make more or less informed guesses. Or we can conduct an experiment, and calculate the average numbers for top pages in the results of the major search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN. For the tables below I used data provided by WebPosition software, which calculates the average scores of the top 5 positions for dozens of keyword searches conducted by WebTrends Inc.
Of course aligning your parameters to the top averages will not guarantee you the high rankings, but it can ensure that your keyword saturation stays within the allowed boundaries. Read More>
Sometimes SEO experts go too far in their desire to push their clients’ sites to top positions and resort to questionable practices, like keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is considered an unethical practice because what you actually do is use the keyword in question throughout the text suspiciously often. Having in mind that the recommended keyword density is from 3 to 7%, anything above this, say 10% density starts to look very much like keyword stuffing and it is likely that will not get unnoticed by search engines. A text with 10% keyword density can hardly make sense, if read by a human. Some time ago Google implemented the so called “Florida Update” and essentially imposed a penalty for pages that are keyword-stuffed and over-optimized in general.
Generally, keyword density in the title, the headings, and the first paragraphs matters more. Needless to say that you should be especially careful not to stuff these areas. Try the Keyword Density Cloud tool to check if your keyword density is in the acceptable limits, especially in the above-mentioned places. If you have a high density percentage for a frequently used keyword, then consider replacing some of the occurrences of the keyword with synonyms. Also, generally words that are in bold and/or italic are considered important by search engines but if any occurrence of the target keywords is in bold and italic, this also looks unnatural and in the best case it will not push your page up.

January 28th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
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