Keyword stuffing, or the practice of shoving as many seo keywords onto a page as physical possible, has long been banned and is a bane of SEO white hats everywhere.
There was a time when keyword stuffing worked on webpage as it works on stuffing a turkey. Back in the early years of search engines, one could easily manipulate a page’s ranking on Google’s SERP with keyword stuffing.
Sites could rank on a large variety of keywords by simply cluttering them onto a page, even if the keywords were unrelated and the site was absent of any real content.
You could be (somewhat) classy about it by hiding the offending keywords, matching their text color to the background color, or you could just be blatantly obnoxious.
Naturally this led to a terrible user experience, because most people aren’t looking to find a site that just reads “duct services in Toronto” repeated 500 times. Google and other search engines wised up and began filtering out and blacklisting offending keyword-stuffed pages, because these pages were largely devoid of useful content.
The Dangers of Keyword Stuffing and Over-Optimizing
Keyword stuffing is now considered a strictly black-hat tactic.
Does keyword stuffing work? It depends on who you ask. It does tend to have some positive short-term effects, but it’s playing with fire and rarely is beneficial in the long run. Google will penalize your site if they catch you stuffing the keyword turkey. Your page could be demoted in rankings, or even removed all together!
Google’s own Matt Cutts warned webmasters about SEO keyword stuffing and over optimization at SXSW last week, saying:
“We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and a great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”
In other words, Google keyword stuffing is a dangerous game, and isn’t likely to get more safe anytime soon.
Google dislikes black hat tactics like SEO keyword stuffing because those methods focus on beating the search engine algorithm rather than a great user experience.
