SEO
Written by: Ryan Walsh
01/ December /2023
It’s an SEO technique you don’t see used that often because most businesses, including their marketing agencies, know it is simply a black hat SEO practice and, therefore, should be avoided like the plague.
So, what exactly is keyword stuffing?
So, keyword stuffing is simply placing words or phrases you want your business to appear on Google by repeatedly mentioning them within the written text. Also, within the other elements of your business SEO.
So, for example, you might repeatedly write them within the meta title and meta description. However, this is an absolute surefire way for the business to incur Google penalties, and sometimes, it can even take years to recover from. So, our best advice is to write the sentences naturally, not keyword stuff.
You might have read an outdated blog post by mentioning keywords within the text many times; this will help improve your business’s search engine optimisation.
You should write your content marketing in a way that is helpful to the reader. Therefore, count how many times you need to input the keywords because if you naturally write the sentences, you will need to know how many times you enter the keywords.
Google’s crawl bots are super clever at detecting spam, so if you write the keywords too much, this is likely to result in the business incurring a penalty.
So, for example, if you sell aluminium ladders and want to rank for that on the first page of Google within the organic results if you mention this product too much, it is likely to mean the business will incur an algorithmic penalty.
Avoid these methods of SEO as well:
Cloaking
Again, this is a black-hat method of SEO and should be avoided. Simply when you make the text the same colour as the background, therefore rendering the text invisible. This will trigger an algorithmic penalty, severely damaging your business’s search engine optimisation.
Bounce rate
So, let’s say that somebody wants to find some advice to solve a problem they might have. So, for example, somebody might be fixing their car, and they can’t get the fuel open.
If you write a beneficial article explaining how that model car, you can fix the problem by purchasing a particular product, which is likely to be proper content marketing; therefore, you might sell more products.
If, on the other hand, you use keyword stuffing, and you keep mentioning the brand of the car and the problem, and then try to offer some links to the product. The person reading the text will likely get annoyed because it will read. Naturally, you won’t provide valuable advice; therefore, the bounce rate is expected to go through the roof.
If the bounce rate is exceptionally high, Google will notice that the bounce rate has increased, meaning that your website is likely to be deemed spam.
Demote or remove altogether.
Some people, especially those who don’t know much about search engine optimisation but want to improve their own businesses’ SEO, might not fully appreciate the severity of a Google penalty. Still, they most certainly should because it could massively reduce the number of organic visitors.
For example, you could go from having 10,000 visitors a month to not having any organic visitors after a Google penalty, meaning you don’t have any sales. You might have to increase your PPC to gain customers.
Panda Update – February 24th, 2011.
What was the Panda Update – February 24th of, 2011?
We assigned a quality score to web pages, which was used for ranking and page authority.
I checked for ‘thin content’, user-generated spam and keyword stuffing.
Many SEO consultants widely think that the Google Panda Update analysed if the page was spam; for example, was keyword stuffing used or is the work content marketing content thin?
Suppose the work is content-thin, which doesn’t offer much helpful or valuable advice. It might also have a meagre word count, so it doesn’t cover the topic in detail. In that case, this work will likely be deemed low quality, negatively impacting your business’s SEO.
Updates to this algorithm over the years have made penalties and fixes quicker.
Hummingbird – August 22nd, 2013
The Google Hummingbird update of August 22nd, 2013
Better results with search intent.
This critical update incorporated latent semantic indexing, producing more accurate results.
The Google Bert – October 22nd, 2019
Focused on ‘poorly written content’, we recommend writing the work in a Microsoft Word processor so that you can check for spelling mistakes; this update also looks for keyword stuffing.
Websites that use keyword stuffing would incur a penalty.
