Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is considered to be an unethical search engine optimization (SEO) technique, which leads to banning a website from major search engines either temporarily or permanently. Keyword stuffing occurs when a web page is loaded with keywords in the meta tags or in content of a web page. The repetition of words in meta tags may explain why many search engines no longer use these tags.

Keyword stuffing had been used in the past to obtain top search engine rankings and visibility for particular phrases. This method is completely outdated and adds no value to rankings today.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" positioning to place text "behind" 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.

With relevance to keyword stuffing, it is quoted by the largest of search engines that they recommend Keyword Research and use (with respect to the quality content you have to offer the web), to aid their visitors in the search of your valuable material. To prevent Keyword Stuffing you should wisely use keywords in respect with SEO, Search Engine Optimization. It could be best described as keywords should be reasonable and necessary, yet it is acceptable to assist with proper placement and your targeted effort to achieve search results. Placement of such words in the provided areas of HTML are perfectly allowed and reasonable. Google discusses keyword stuffing as Randomly Repeated Keywords.

In online journalism

Headlines in online news sites are increasingly packed with just the search-friendly keywords that identify the story. Puns and plays on words have gone by the wayside. Overusing this strategy is also called keyword stuffing. Old-school reporters and editors frown on the practice, but it is effective in optimizing news stories for search.^[1]

See also

• Cloaking
• Doorway pages
• Spamdexing
• Scraper site

References

External links

• Google Guidelines
• Yahoo! Guidelines
• Live Search (MSN Search) Guidelines