The rise and fall of keyword stuffing

SEO is one of the most talked about topics on the internet. All websites, whether for business or fun, must show up in the search engine results pages [SERPs] to be visible to searchers. A keyword is an industry or product related work or phrase that internet users use to find information or products they are searching for with the help of a search engine. So if you have a website that sells hiking boots a searcher will type ‘hiking boots’ in the search bar.

The search engine will check its database for all articles on hiking boots. It then sorts the information it has found into the order of the most relevant first and so forth. The user then gets to view the results; the search results pages.

In the infant days of search engines it looked at meta tag descriptions and title on the web page and from there worked out the keyword density. It would look at an article of say 300 words long on hiking boots and lets say it found the keyword 6 times. This would mean keyword density of [6/300] x 100 = 2%.

Human nature

Of course soon webmasters got the idea that they will rank better if they used their keyword ‘hiking boots’ ten or twenty time in an article and so keyword stuffing was born. Inevitably this lead to search engine confusion as the SEs could no longer distinguish which articles would be the most relevant for a searcher.
The search engines countered this by disregarding keyword density, yet webmasters happily continued with this practice. As the search engines tried to curb what became known as spamming, webmasters sought other ways to stuff those keywords in. Some started using same colour font as the page background so that users couldn’t see it, but the search engine spiders could. Today we call this text cloaking and it falls under black hat SEO.

Search engines moved on

Algorithms changed and search engines no longer count keyword density, but instead judges what the page content is about, thereby discounting keyword density and Meta tags. Yet far too many webmasters are stuck in the previous century and still cram keywords in.

SEs look at the relationship that forms between the words in an article as naturally structured sentences automatically have an assortment of words that relate to the topic. So the only way to fit the criteria of the relationship between words is to write a natural flowing article. By trying to write copy to force-fit a high keyword density tells the search engines that the page presented is of little value.

Wise up

At the level of development of the search engines at the moment, trying to stuff keywords in only results in totally defeating the object of trying to get ranked high. It is time to wise up and take the advice of the search engines and start writing optimised articles for human visitors and not search engine spiders. It does not help your ranking in the least; it only results in being accused of being a spammer and of using black hat SEO. This results in penalties and could get your website banned from the search engines.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 6th, 2009 at 3:14 pm and is filed under SEO Keywords. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.