What is Keyword Stuffing or Keyword Spamming?
Years ago, websites would employ a rather sneaky SEO tactic of stuffing keywords into their content to get higher search engine rankings. This usually lead to really badly written content that sounded like this:
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See how the website tried to stuff the paragraph with keywords, even if it didn’t make sense? And that’s not all. Others would write the text in the same color as the background – basically painting the web page with their keyword phrases!
All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and a great site.”
Matt Cutts, Google’s Head for Web Spam
All those people do is over optimization versus those making great content and a great site.”
But Google and other search engines have gotten a lot smarter. Now, they lower the ranking or even ban websites that use keyword stuffing or keyword spamming.
Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, says: “We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and a great site.”
Cutt says that marketers should focus less on trying to “cheat” Google results with keyword spamming or abuse of backlinks and focus more on creating quality content.
“We are trying to make Google Bot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”
Google rewards and prioritizes websites with relevant content. The best websites combines SEO tactics with good writing and a strategic understanding of what your reader wants to learn and do.
That’s why it’s important to hire professional content writers who will write both for your market and for search engines. They know both content marketing and search engine optimization. They write well, they write strategically, and they will help drive your website to the top search results.