Keyword Stuffing in SEO: What It Is & How to Avoid It (original) (raw)

What Is Keyword Stuffing?

Keyword stuffing is a spammy SEO tactic that involves unnaturally forcing keywords into webpages. With the aim of ranking higher on the search engine results page.

For example, the main content might read like this:

Content that reads "Our cheap shoes are perfect for anyone looking to buy cheap shoes for any occasion. These affordable cheap shoes are made with the finest materials, and our selection includes cheap shoes in various style such as cheap sneakers, cheap heels, and cheap boots."

Keyword stuffing may also occur in the following places:

1. Title tags and meta descriptions (which can be used to generate search engine snippets):

A search engine result with the title "Cheap Affordable Footwear - Buy Cheap Sneakers Heels Boots" and a description that reads "Shop now for the best shoes at our cheap discount footwear store! We have cheap sneakers, cheap heels, cheap boots, and cheap shoes to buy online."

2. URLs (webpage addresses):

A URL bar with a URL that reads: https://www.example.com/cheap-affordable-discount-footwear-shoes/

3. Anchor text (text that hyperlinks are attached to):

Anchor text that reads "buy cheap affordable boots online."

4. Alt text (HTML image descriptions used by screen readers and search engines):

A trainer with an arrow pointing to code that reads: <img src=“shoes-header-image.jpg” alt=“Cheap shoes, affordable shoes, discount shoes”>

It’s normal for keywords to occur and reoccur within content.

But as our keyword stuffing examples show, it’s unhelpful to place them excessively or unnaturally.

How Keyword Stuffing Affects SEO

Keyword stuffing is bad for SEO because it leads to poor-quality content.

Unnatural keyword usage looks spammy. This can discourage users from interacting with your page or link and harm your brand image.

Also, Google rewards high-quality, person-first content. Meaning if you purposefully stuff a webpage with keywords, it’s unlikely to rank well.

Keyword stuffing also violates Google’s spam policies.

If Google detects that you’ve:

You may see your rankings suffer. Or even receive a manual action (also known as a Google penalty). This means that your site will be suppressed or removed from Google search results.

Why Websites Use Keyword Stuffing

Websites use keyword stuffing in a misguided effort to earn higher SEO rankings.

In the early days of SEO, keyword stuffing could lead to higher rankings.

Google’s algorithm treated pages with keywords—or more repetitions of the keyword—as more relevant. And gave weight to keyword-rich backlinks.

Google has since rolled out numerous algorithm updates to devalue or penalize keyword stuffing.

Which means Google understands context and currently ranks pieces based on factors like comprehensiveness and search intent. Rather than how many times you use a keyword.

Also, Google’s current web spam detection systems are highly effective. So keyword stuffing will hurt your performance in search results.

That being said, Google does look for search terms on pages to determine whether they’re relevant to the user:

The most basic signal that information is relevant is when content contains the same keywords as your search query. For example, with web pages, if those keywords appear on the page, or if they appear in the headings or body of the text, the information might be more relevant.

And does use anchor text to understand what linked pages are about.

But you don’t need to use a keyword on a page a certain number of times to rank for it. Or have numerous incoming links with keyword-rich anchor text.

How to Identify Keyword Stuffing

You can manually identify keyword stuffing by reading your content. And checking for the excessive or unnatural placement of keywords.

If you want to bulk analyze content for keyword stuffing, some SEO tools will scrape content (e.g., all your alt text) and export it to a spreadsheet.

But this can still be a time-consuming and subjective process. So, let’s learn how to speed things up with two Semrush tools: On-Page SEO Tool and Backlink Audit.

Analyze Your Site with Semrush’s On Page SEO Tool

To check your on-site content more efficiently, import your pages and their target keywords into Semrush’s On Page SEO Tool.

The tool calculates keyword density (i.e., what proportion of words are keywords) in the following tags: