Why should keyword stuffing be avoided?

EliteWriter Level 3

June 27, 2016, 11:39 am

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Why should keyword stuffing be avoided?

Keyword stuffing is a term that we hear quite often in article and content writing. It is considered as a big no no if you want the content to do well. But many people ask why is this so when the inclusion of keywords is so important for SEO purposes?

Basically, to put it as simply as possible, even though SEO should always be given importance while writing, if you stuff keywords you will end up negatively impacting the readability of your content, as well as its conversion rate and how well it can manage to ranks in SERPs. With keyword stuffing search engines will not be happy and bounce rates will increase.

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idealmike

Well I think you've just answered your own question EW! Keyword stuffing is a bh practice and comes with a nice penalty if you're caught doing it too much. But when is too much, too much? How many keywords before you're stuffing them you know? I think it's good practice to put a few specific and a several broad keywords but any more than this is just overkill. Take WordPress tags for example, how many tags is too many tags? Sometimes you can write a 2500 word article and it can be broken down into about 4 or 5 parts and each part be on something different although related. And with each part you could create say 5 keywords (tags) about it. So when you add all your tags that could be about 25+ tags. Is that too many tags? But what if they're all relevant? And then the same can be asked about your meta keywords as well. How many meta keywords is too much? At where do you draw the line? Is there a specific number that Google considers to be stuffing? What if you're one keyword tag over the suggested limit? I'm sure how it's policed but I think that if you add more than you need, that could be considered stuffing. So therefore, you should only add what you need to add and no more. A few specific and a few general broad keywords and no more!

10 years ago

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Lynne

Finding the right ratio of keywords to content is very important. It is amazing how just using the keyword one more time can suddenly crash your SEO for a post.

I really enjoyed using Yoast plugin when I first started content writing because it has a checklist and once you have written your content you can check everything is correct. I used to love the challenge of getting it green.

10 years ago

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Everett

I wondered if you actually noticed any difference between writing the content without the plugin versus writing the content with the plugin. I used another plugin, and it was free one (I think Yoast is a free plugin, correct?), and it basically did nothing in terms of SEO for me. I even decided to not use the plugin for a post, and found that I was actually able to rank that post higher for my keywords. The keywords weren't really that hard to rank but there was some competition, and i seemed to practically beat that competition manually, without the plugin.

Now if I could only remember what the plugin was..

10 years ago

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Lynne

Hi Everett

I now use Allinone SEO and it is great. I think Yoast suited me very well when I first started out simply because I was new to SEO and it was great to be able to have a checklist like that. One of the things it checked was the right amount of keywords. If you didn't have the keyword enough or in the right places it let you know, if you added your keyword just a little too much then it let you know too. \

Now that I know what I am doing I enjoy Allinone, which is also a free plugin.

10 years ago

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Everett

Do you think you would ever "upgrade" to a paid SEO Wordpress plugin? What is it that the paid plugins have that the free plugins are lacking? What exactly would make you spend your money on a plugin if it was massively better than Allinone or Yoast?

10 years ago

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Everett

Yes, keyword stuffing should be avoided as it is labeled as Black Hat by the team of programmers that develops the Google bot that actually indexes, and ranks the content. The short term effects of keyword stuffing could be good, however in the long run Google will actually penalize the website. Also, some keywords that may be used sometimes are not within your targeted audience, you may rank for keywords that your product or website is not associated with. This can actually do more harm for your business than good. I use to keyword stuff, and surely it worked wonders, but now I won't even do it anymore as it's basically worthless now.

10 years ago

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vinaya

The right way to use keywords on your written contents is by following a ration of 20:1, for every 20 words you write, you can use your keyword. If you are writing a 1000 word article, only 50 words should be your keywords. If you use more than 50 keywords in 1000 word article, that will be termed keyword stuffing. When you use keywords more than the general practice, your content will sound that it is written for search engines instead of humans.

9 years ago

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Corzhens

I have to be honest about my feelings with this kind of violation. So many discussions say that keyword stuffing violates a rule of Google so that your site can be sanctioned. I am skeptic of that because I don’t think Google will waste time just to check if the web page has excessive keywords. Pardon my audacity with this comment. What’s on my mind is the time element needed to check on those things that I don’t think the search engines have time for that.

8 years ago

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