Keyword stuffing is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique i.e considered as webspam. Many webmasters use this technique to gain an unfair rank advantage in search engines. One who uses this technique loads a web page’s noticeable content, meta tags or backlink anchor text with the focus keyword. This technique of getting traffic is dangerous. It may lead to the website’s temporarily or permanently ban or penalization over main search engines.
The excessive repetition of keywords in meta tags is the reason that is why many search engines are not using these tags to rank web pages. Now, search engines mainly focus on the content or text that should be unique, comprehensive, helpful, and relevant that improves the overall quality of your webpage. That’s why nowadays this technique is useless. But it is still repeated by many webmasters.
Types of visible keyword stuffing include:
- Unnecessarily repetition of words or phrases
- Adding words that are out of context
- Inserting blocks of the same keyword
- Using keywords that are not related to the topic of the page
Also Visit: What is SEO in Digital Marketing? How SEO works for websites?
Keyword Stuffing Example
Now it is sure, that you will not receive any benefit of this black hat SEO technique. But you may hurt your site rankings by misusing it. Many of the main search engines have executed algorithms, that are efficient to recognize keyword stuffing. So if search engines will detect your keyword stuffing, they may downgrade your rankings or may penalize or remove your website from their indexes. But even if you are dying to use it somewhere, you can try this tactic over news websites. Sometimes it is observed that Keyword Stuffing helps the news articles to index fastly in search engines.
Changes and algorithms particularly designed to penalize or ban sites that use such black hat SEO techniques include:
- Google Florida update (November 2003)
- Google Panda (February 2011)
- Bing’s September 2014 update
- Google Hummingbird (August 2013)
Also Visit: History of Keyword Stuffing | Revealed!