Keyword Stuffing - Kicking It Old School SEO
Keyword stuffing is an old, old, OLD SEO trick. As a matter of fact, I don't see it much anymore. However, I still get well-meaning students in my SEO training classes asking if it's OK to do this. There's never too much of a good thing, is there?
Actually, yes there is too much of a good thing with keyword stuffing.
Let's start with a definition - keyword stuffing is taking a word or a phrase, and using it many, many, many times in text and tags out of context, so it appears redundant and looks like gibberish, which it is. It's a gross over-use of a word or phrase.
And yes, like the title says, it's old school SEO stuff. Google got wise to this tactic a long time ago, but it's still around, only it's not as popular as it once was.
Here are some screenshots of it in search results:
As you can see, this doesn't do squat for the user experience. Doing this SEO tactic doesn't:
- Increase click through rate (CTR) - who's going to select a gibberish title or description?
- Tell us what we can expect to read about on the page
- Inspire confidence in the web site with this poor writing
Mind you, I had to go deep for these examples.
What Does Google Have To Say About Keyword Stuffing?
If you've been in the SEO game awhile, you can probably guess that the search engine isn't overly fond of this tactic, and you're absolutely correct. Read about it here in their quality guidelines.
By the way, Google no longer uses the keyword tag for ranking purposes; they completely ignore it. Why? You guessed it - keyword stuffing. Spammers were abusing this poor tag so bad, it was removed as a ranking factor in the search algorithm. This is why we can't have nice things.
Now that you know, go back through your published content. Are you redundant with your chosen keyword phrases in the titles, descriptions and text? Are you even still populating the keyword tag? This is a good time to re-write any that look remotely like you're over-using the keyword phrase for a page or post.
Want to learn more about what not to do to get on Google's bad side? In our advanced SEO class, you'll learn more about the spam and black hat tactics that aren't part of a good SEO program.
Until next time, stay safely between the ditches!
All the very best to you,
Nancy McDonald
Image courtesy of https://www.flickr.com/photos/glenng/3773323023
Screen shots courtesy of author