Keyword Stuffing

A banned, black hat SEO technique also known as spamming. Keyword stuffing involves inserting an excessive amount of repeating keywords (often as lists or as awkward sentences which repeat a word or phrase several times) into the content or HTML of a webpage. If your website employs keyword stuffing, most search engines can detect some or all of it. Once they find spam, some search engines will place a spam filter on your webpage (which lowers your site's PageRank), while others—like Google—may ban your website immediately.

Keyword stuffing also includes the practice of deliberately using irrelevant keywords to increase rankings (i.e., a discount office supply retailer inserting frequently used keywords like "CNN news" "sex" or "Disneyland" into the text or the HTML Metatag).

Search engines like Google and Yahoo do recommend the use of keywords, often encouraging websites to do some keyword research on the best words to attract the right audience. So when does appropriate, logical use of keywords turn into spamming? A good rule to go by is this: if the keywords are interrupting or distracting from the legitimate purpose of a webpage (conveying useful information to a human website visitor), you've gone overboard and are headed for the dangerous waters of keyword stuffing.

Google defines keyword stuffing "randomly repeated keywords." Here's an example of keyword stuffing disguised into the text of a webpage: "If you like giving mother's day gifts, buy your mother's day gifts here! We have mother's day gifts for all of your mother's day gifts buying need." The best way to avoid getting banned by keyword stuffing is to display good, informative text on your website. It's also important not to repeat text often throughout the website, or use text from other sites since search engines also search for duplicate text.

In some cases, the lists of keywords aren't visible to most human website visitors (it may be hidden text that's the same color as the background, text that displays off screen, text that's displayed in a font too small to read, or text that's placed behind a picture). In these cases, the keywords are only visible to search engines (the power gods behind creating search engine results). Text that is hidden like this is detected by most major search engines and labeled as spam.

Keyword stuffing was once considered "grey hat SEO" and was often used in the past to increase a website's search engine rankings and increase traffic. Keyword stuffing is now clearly defined as unethical.

In addition to spamming and keyword stuffing, other black hat SEO techniques to avoid include: cloaking, code-swapping, hidden text, hidden links, using doorway pages, sneaky redirect pages, using duplicate text or creating duplicate websites, link farms, and listing links to banned sites.