Keyword Stuffing is Alive and Well in Webdom

Probably the oldest, and longest condemned black hat tactic, keyword stuffing should have died out long ago. But for every expert that condemns it, there are dozens of overeager, inexperienced writer who fancy themselves experts without exercising common sense!

They produce stupidly senseless writing that gets very little benefit, and which people cannot stand to read. It has no value to anyone. Sometimes Yahoo or MSN will temporarily boost the traffic for such a page, but Google drops it almost immediately. The temporary boost from the smaller search engines is not nearly enough to make up for what is lost from Google.

Keyword stuffing consists of illogical, repetitive use of keywords, in a way that does not make sense to human readers. Every thinking person recognizes it when they see it, whether they know the official name for it or not.

Recently I was asked to review a website. The site owner had hired an “SEO expert” to optimize her site. She paid quite a bit for it, and had an ongoing contract for additional work. In the middle of it, she realized that things were not going as she had hoped (she was, in fact, losing traffic), and she dropped the contract. I looked at her site to see what the problem was.

She sold a product locally, and wished to encourage local site traffic. The “expert” had gone through the home page, and had put keyword strings of locations, combined with the word “delivery” in the title tag, keyword tag, description tag, above the header, below the header, below the product images, and a LONG keyword string below that, an additional short one below that, and again at the very bottom of the page - oh, and once more in the sidebar. Other pages of the site were no better, they contained nothing more than strings of keywords instead of content!

The next plan that the “expert” was going to implement was to create individual pages, within individual folders, for the various regional locations - each page, again, to be stuffed with keyword strings but no usable content!

People had no reason to stay on the site, and search engines had no way of knowing what the real product was since there was so much emphasis on location, and virtually no useful content.

Before we could even begin, we had to strip out all the stuff that was harming the site, and then we had to insert actual content - descriptions of the product, catchy phrases about how it makes the customer feel, and thoughtful ideas for using it creatively. Each of those had logical keywords scattered through them, in a very readable way.

It still amazes me that anyone calling themselves an expert could think that keyword stuffing was a good idea! They KNOW that search engine companies penalize for it. They KNOW that it looks stupid, and makes a business look stupid. It boggles my mind that someone could NOT know that it is a harmful tactic, especially if they call themselves an expert and sell SEO services! It makes me wonder what they are basing their claim of experience on, and just what sources they are relying on for training!

Sadly, keyword stuffing is alive and well. But it isn’t smart, and never will be. Just remember - if the writing looks stupid - it is!