Keyword stuffing is an antiquated, blackhat SEO strategy that, years ago, propelled websites to Page 1 of search engine results pages by deceiving search algorithms into rating the page authoritative for that search keyword simply because of the number of times it appears on the page.
It’s long since lost its luster as today the practice gives no SEO value and can add penalties to your site’s rating, in some cases getting sites banned from Google search.
There are several ways this practice manifests itself on webpages. And it’s important you be aware of each so as to ensure you’re not guilty of keyword stuffing and don’t even know it. Here’s the lowdown:
- On Page – Visible: Stuffing keywords on the page and visible to viewers is the way most people think of keyword stuffing. Literally it’s packing the page with your search term in ways that are even unnatural to language. In normal language, we often avoid repeating terms or words, opting instead for using synonyms or pronouns in natural speech. For instance, a law firm service page that reads:
Our medical malpractice firm has a long history of winning big medical malpractice cases for victims of medical malpractice across the spectrum of medical malpractice infractions.
Now this sounds ridiculous, sure. But it’s a practice that was popularized in the early years of SEO management as a digital marketing strategy. And it worked.
- On Page – Invisible: Visible keyword stuffing is an admittedly ridiculous practice. If your site did rank well using the practice, it almost didn’t matter because people who visited the page instantly lost trust in the business because the language on the page was so inconceivably bad. So businesses quickly began stuffing keywords onto the page in white lettering. Yes, white lettering, blends in with the white page color so that the keywords would not be visible to the naked eye. Yet they would be visible to Google algorithms. And that way, the website received mega points for all those repeated keywords without losing credibility in the eyes of site visitors reading the website’s copy.
- Metadata Keyword Stuffing: For those who understand the power of metadata optimization, keyword stuffing remains to this day a tempting prospect for securing positioning your page’s content might not be good enough to secure on its own. The practice of keyword stuffing in metatags like a webpage’s meta title, the meta description or a photo’s alt language or description field is a potent one. It’s one that takes advantage of the fact that Google still does evaluate and value keyword usage in metadata and rewards proper use of keywords in these fields. The problem is people stuff those keywords not just using them once or twice in the small 80 character pane, which, of course, makes no sense. Don’t think Google doesn’t catch this and penalize it because the search engine is well aware of the practice and is happy to bounce your site into the sandbox (pushing it back up to 25 pages in search results) or de-indexing your site altogether when it finds you guilty of the practice.
If you would like to learn how Proctor Digital can help you develop potent SEO strategies that keep you on Google’s good side, call us at 773.664.5819. We’d love to help!