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SEO No No’s – Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing has long been looked down upon and seen as an unethical practice in the online world. Luckily for internet users today, major search engines have taken steps to eliminate stuffing and maintain quality search results for their patrons. Here is a look at what exactly keyword stuffing is and what major companies like Google and Bing are doing to keep their results relevant.

Before one can understand keyword stuffing, they need to understand search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the practice of boosting the visibility of one’s website so that it ranks higher in search results and will therefore receive more traffic. There are a few different ways to accomplish this including keeping popular search terms and keywords on a website so that they are recognized when a query is run on an internet search engine. Again, keywords are only a portion of what goes into how results are ranked by a search engine and their importance varies depending on the search engine queried.

Keyword stuffing comes in to play when a website owner is looking to stack the deck in favor of their site by including as many keywords onto their site as they can. This can be done by just blatantly repeating a search term on the page with no attempt of trying to conceal it or a little more discreetly such as including a search term in a text color that matches the background so visitors to the page will not see it. These methods were very effective but made for a poor online experience for the internet user.

While keyword stuffing used to be an effective way to bump up a webpage after a word search query, search engine’s decided to take action to filter sites that do this. Google, the world’s largest search engine, will penalize sites that attempt to keyword stuff by dropping a site in search rankings or completely removing it from its results. Bing has just recently begun to combat this problem as well and is taking a similar approach as Google as its terms of service states, “Stuffing your content with specific keywords with the sole intent of artificially inflating the probability of ranking for specific search terms is in violation of our guidelines and can lead to demotion or even the delisting of your website from our search results.”

Providing a positive internet experience for the user is one of the main objectives of the many online search engines out there.While these search engines are employed with the means to catch some keyword stuffers, there are those whom are still able to successfully beat the system. As technology improves, keyword stuffing will become a distant memory and internet searching will become an even better experience for the user by providing increasingly better results.