What Is Keyword Stuffing?



Keyword stuffing is simply the process of repeating the same keyword or keyphrases over and over in a page. It’s counter productive. It’s is a signpost of a very low quality spam site and  is something Google clearly recommends you avoid. It is:

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

It makes your text often unreadable. It often (really often) gets a page booted out of Google but it depends on the intent and the trust and authority of a site – and I’d think it would be diferent rules for different verticals (perhaps). Its is sloppy seo. It is a bastian of useless seo companies.

It might get a page to rank for a while, but will it convert any customers to leads and sales? It is obviously not a tactic you want to employ in search of long term rankings.

It can be a bit of an art though. There’s clearly a tipping point, very difficult to identify. Just because someone else is successfully doing it do not automatically think you will get a way with it –  page penalties really do depend on the site you do it on but penalties are common.

Don’t do it – there’s better ways of ranking in Google without resorting to it.

keyword stuffing

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6 Responses

  1. Phil Green says:

    Damn you’re posting a lot today. Putting me to shame with your posting rate! Its been a long time since I keyword stuffed, or even since I measured KD. I just try and write as naturally as I can, and then once I’ve written the content I scan over it and make sure I’ve not used the same phrase(s) so many times that it reads poorly to a human. I would not worry at all about how Google sees the content. I think at this point they are more than intelligent enough to see a site that contains “shoes” once, but also includes “feet, slippers, nike, socks, running” etc is about your topic – there is only a risk from keyword stuffing with no potential upside, imo.

    • Shaun Anderson (Hobo) says:

      yeah I set up the blog to autopost on Sunday :) I’ve got 200 drafts I need to get out lol – OCD eh? I do try and write naturally but I found it interesting to note on a Google presentation about SEO what it said about your content:

      At the most basic level, Google matches: * What users want—What they type; and * What’s offered online—Text on pages …and ranks your page based on: * How well it matches—How often keywords appear; and * Your site’s reputation—How many other sites link to you …relative to everyone else’s pages

  2. Phil Green says:

    Do you have a specific number of times you want to use a keyword in your head when you write something? I would think if someone deliberately used a keyword 5 times in a post, they just cost themselves traffic because they would have got longtail traffic for 4 similar words if they’d used them – and made it read better. 200 posts? I’ve about 3 half written, and that’s it lol.

  3. Shaun Anderson (Hobo) says:

    Do you have a specific number of times you want to use a keyword in your head when you write something?

    No. And depends on the relative authority of the site I am working on. And I consider the industry, or vertical. I’ll also consider what the competition is up to, to be honest. I know that the page is got to be about that keyword term and I think about that a lot. It’s got to be repeated on sites with no authority. It’s got to be in the title unless you have a lot of incoming links. Yeah I write so much stuff I don’t get round to posting much of it!

  4. DeveloperNetwork says:

    For example if your keyword was “ultimate” and you repeated it 20 times on your page would that be extreme keyword stuffing or minor because i approx use that amount. What would be really bad keyword stuffing? How many words on a page? Thanks again for this wonderful post. PSHow do you get the auto post feature.

    • Shaun Anderson (Hobo) says:

      I autopost (or schedule) via my WordPress admin panel. To stay on the safe side i would just stick to natural text and sprinkle your keyword in there where it still reads as natural. Don’t bother trying to identify the magic number…. it’s probably a floating point.



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