What Is Keyword Stuffing?

Source: Seobility

Date First Published: 23rd August 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 5/10

CONTENTS

Examples Of Keyword Stuffing
Does Keyword Stuffing Still Work?

Learn more about what keyword stuffing is in this article.

Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO technique that involves placing an unnecessarily large amount of keywords onto a page to manipulate the search engine ranking of a website. The keywords may be placed in the meta tags, anchor text, alt attributes, or visible content. Keyword stuffing is often used to artificially boost the ranking of a page in the search engine results page (SERP) and drive traffic to malicious, spammy, or fraudulent websites.

Examples Of Keyword Stuffing

Four examples of keyword stuffing are:

Unnatural repetition of certain words or phrases (e.g. Our online store sells handmade birthday cards. A wide variety of handmade birthday cards can be found here. These handmade birthday cards can be found in all sorts of colours and sizes. If you have any questions about our handmade birthday cards, you can contact us about our handmade birthday cards on this page.) The keyword 'handmade birthday cake' appears too many times in such a small amount of text here and is suggestive of keyword stuffing.
Adding keywords that are irrelevant to the topic of the page in order for it to rank higher on searches unrelated to that page.
Repeating the same paragraphs of text multiple times on the page.
Repeating keywords that are hidden from a visitor but visible to a search engine (e.g. making the text the exact same colour as the webpage background so that it is unreadable by users but readable by search engine bots).

Keyword stuffing can cause websites to be penalised by search engines, meaning that they will appear lower down in the rankings. In some cases, it can cause websites to be completely removed from the search engine results page. The reason why it gives a bad user experience is that no one would want to read content full of repeated words that add no value. It would cause users to become unsatisfied and it is likely that they would immediately leave the website, increasing the bounce rate.

Does Keyword Stuffing Still Work?

Today, keyword stuffing no longer works and this method is outdated. In the early days of search engines, individuals and companies would write low-quality content and stuff it with keywords in the hope that it would rank higher in the search engines. Visitors got irritated by this and the algorithms of search engines have changed a lot since then. Search engines no longer determine the ranking of a page based on keyword frequency and often have algorithms that are capable of detecting keyword stuffing and preventing it from manipulating the search engine ranking. Keyword stuffing now has the opposite effect as search engines will penalise websites that decide to keyword stuff. It is clear that keyword stuffing benefits no one.

Search engines now focus more on content that is unique, helpful, and relevant to users, which makes keyword stuffing useless. However, there are definitely some website owners that still engage in keyword stuffing. The Google Florida Update (released in November 2003), Google Panda update (released in February 2011), Google Hummingbird update (released in August 2013), and Bing's September 2014 update were changes in algorithms intended to penalise or ban sites that keyword stuff. Keyword stuffing is one of the reasons why search engines no longer pay much attention to the meta tags used to specify keywords related to the page (meta keywords).