Keyword stuffing is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique, considered webspam or spamdexing, in which keywords are loaded into a web page's meta tags, visible content, or backlink anchor text in an attempt to gain an unfair rank advantage in search engines. Keyword stuffing may lead to a website being temporarily or permanently banned or penalized on major search engines.[1] The repetition of words in meta tags may explain why many search engines no longer use these tags. Nowadays, search engines focus more on the content that is unique, comprehensive, relevant, and helpful that overall makes the quality better which makes keyword stuffing useless, but it is still practiced by many webmasters.[citation needed]
Many major search engines have implemented algorithms that recognize keyword stuffing, and reduce or eliminate any unfair search advantage that the tactic may have been intended to gain, and oftentimes they will also penalize, demote or remove websites from their indexes that implement keyword stuffing.
Changes and algorithms specifically intended to penalize or ban sites using keyword stuffing include the Google Florida update (November 2003) Google Panda (February 2011)[2] Google Hummingbird (August 2013)[3] and Bing's September 2014 update.[4]
YouTube Encyclopedic
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Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing
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What is Keyword Density? What is a Good Keyword Density for SEO?
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What is the ideal keyword density of a page?
Transcription
>>Matt: Hi everybody. This is Matt. >>Nelson: And I'm Nelson. >>Matt: And we wanted to talk to you a little bit today about hidden text and keyword stuffing. So, what does it mean if you get a message like this in Google's free Webmaster Tools? The Webmaster console basically says "In our opinion, your site has hidden text or keyword stuffing." Now luckily this is a relatively straightforward thing. But let's walk through it just so people have the context. So how would you describe hidden text? >>Nelson: Hidden text is text that's visible to computers or search engines but not necessarily visible to users. >>Matt: Mm-hm. >>Nelson: So it could be white text on a white background and sometimes we see sites using CSS to mark the visibility of the text to "hidden" or to even move it completely off the page. >>Matt: Yep. Absolutely. And just to be clear. Like, there are some frameworks that will have JavaScript where the text becomes visible after you mouse over. And stuff like that. As long as you're doing a normal sort of idiom, that's typically OK. What we're talking about is, you'll have a paragraph at the bottom of the page that's full of key words. Or something like that. Things that you wanna rank for, but unless the users see the content on the page, they don't know whether they can stay on the page. Whether it's really the content that they're looking for. OK, so hidden text is one. The other one is keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is almost like a grab bag term to describe a lot of different things. You can be repeating a lot of the same words over and over again. "Payday loans, payday loans, payday loans." You can use different words, you know. So you're talking about "Free credit cards." "Credit cards." "Weight loss pill." You know. All sorts of stuff it can even be almost gibberish like. So, if you're using a program to autogenerate stuff. And you're making things that are like, don't make any sense whatsoever. Maybe you've got a spinning program and it spins really badly. Maybe you've got a Markov model program. You paid 99 dollars to somebody, and you know, it's just throwing all sorts of keywords out there. But if a regular person reading it would say, "This doesn't really make sense. It doesn't hold together." Then that's likely to be something that we would consider keyword stuffing. OK. So, you've gotten this message. You know what hidden text is. You know what keyword stuffing is. So how do you correct it? What would you do, Nelson? >>Nelson: Yeah, it's pretty simple. Just find the hidden text or the keyword stuffing and remove it. >>Matt: Mm-hm. Yeah. And there's a lot, you know, you can "control A." You can "view the source." It's possible, in theory, that you got hacked. But most of the time if you get this message either you or your Webmaster or your SEO agency will know actually. "Yeah, OK. We tried to embed these words here." Or "We autogenerated a bunch of these words on this page." And so if you get this message you should know what was going on. So fix it by removing it. And then the second aspect is to document it. So we need to know not only that the issue's been corrected. But hopefully that there's a good faith effort that it won't happen again in the future. So any context, how did it happen? How do you know that it won't happen again? Was it a CMS project that, content management system, that went crazy? Or was it someone that thought he was trying to help but, of course, wasn't actually helping? Any of that sort of stuff to help us understand how the text got there, and what you're doing so that the text won't be there in the future really helps us to make that reconsideration request. Anything we've forgotten? >>Nelson: No. I think we're good. >>Matt: OK. It's a relatively straightforward thing. I know it's stressful to get these messages but we're trying to figure out what's the best user experience. And if a user lands on the page and they don't see the words that they were searching for, that's a really bad user experience. And likewise if they land on a page, and they figure out "Oh, this was just nonsense text." Then they get angry. They complain. They're unhappy. And so it's in everybody's best interests if your pages are returned and users come to your page because it really does have the content that you promised. That you offered to people. So if you get this message, just remove the keyword stuffing. Remove the hidden text. Do a reconsideration request and hopefully you should be in pretty good shape.
History
Keyword stuffing had been used in the past to obtain top search engine rankings and visibility for particular phrases. This method is outdated and adds no value to rankings today. In particular, Google no longer gives good rankings to pages employing this technique.
Hiding text from the visitor is done in many different ways. Text colored to blend with the background, CSS z-index positioning to place text underneath an image — and therefore out of view of the visitor — and CSS absolute positioning to have the text positioned far from the page center are all common techniques. By 2005, many invisible text techniques were easily detected by major search engines.
"Noscript" tags are another way to place hidden content within a page. While they are a valid optimization method for displaying an alternative representation of scripted content, they may be abused, since search engines may index content that is invisible to most visitors.
Sometimes inserted text includes words that are frequently searched (such as "sex"), even if those terms bear little connection to the content of a page, in order to attract traffic to advert-driven pages.
In the past, keyword stuffing was considered to be either a white hat or a black hat tactic, depending on the context of the technique, and the opinion of the person judging it. While a great deal of keyword stuffing was employed to aid in spamdexing, which is of little benefit to the user, keyword stuffing in certain circumstances was not intended to skew results in a deceptive manner. Whether the term carries a pejorative or neutral connotation is dependent on whether the practice is used to pollute the results with pages of little relevance, or to direct traffic to a page of relevance that would have otherwise been de-emphasized due to the search engine's inability to interpret and understand related ideas. This is no longer the case. Search engines now employ themed, related keyword techniques to interpret the intent of the content on a page.
In online journalism
Headlines in online news sites are increasingly packed with just the search-friendly keywords that identify the story. Traditional reporters and editors frown on the practice, but it is effective in optimizing news stories for search.[5]
See also
- Cloaking
- Content farm
- Doorway pages
- Hidden text
- Link farming
- Scraper site
- Spamdexing
- Trademark stuffing
- White fonting
References
- ^ Irrelevant keywords, Google Keyword Quality Guidelines
- ^ The Panda That Hates Farms: A Q&A With Google’s Top Search Engineers, Wired.com, March 3, 2011
- ^ All About the New Google "Hummingbird" Update, SearchEngineLand.com.com, September 26, 2013
- ^ Bing URL Stuffing Spam Filtering, Bing.com Blogs, September 10, 2014
- ^ On Language, The Web Is At War With Itself, Linton Weeks, for National Public Radio, July 15, 2010.
External links
This page was last edited on 8 June 2024, at 17:07