Keyword stuffing, is a blackhat SEO technique

Don’t take blogging shortcuts that can hurt your web site

Did you know that keyword stuffing isn’t considered ethical SEO, and that it is a blackhat SEO technique that can get you penalized from the search engines?

Keyword stuffing is nothing more than a blackhat SEO technique, that involves the over usage of repeated keywords or keyword phrases to attempt to manipulate a webpage’s relevancy for a search term. At one time it worked very effectively, but today’s search engines are much wiser, and they penalize sites which are caught using such techniques. You could even get your website banned from Google and any other search engine which doesn’t condone these blackhat SEO methods.

It is said, that Google, actually assigns a lower pagerank (PR) value to sites which are caught using such SEO tactics, so it isn’t worth the risk!

On the other side of the spectrum, you have people who are innocent which have inadvertently stepped over the line. It is easy to do when you are concentrating on your keywords, that you want to promote when writing your article. The next thing you know, you have stepped over the boundaries, and now you find yourself in bad territory.

Where is the great divide located between good keyword density and keyword stuffing?

Most search engines have a predetermined algorithm to handle keyword stuffing, which isn’t disclosed. If that were to be known, writers would use the maximum amount of keywords in their articles. These articles would have a much higher tendency to border more on the side of black hat SEO and lack content.

Since the search engines won’t divulge these limits, how do you know where to draw the line?

One of the best methods to use, is to do a Google search for your keyword terms and then compare the title, description, keywords and page content of the top ten results. There are many free SEO keyword density tools available on the Internet, that you can check your article keyword density ratio with. A good starting point for keyword density for page content, is from 5% to 15%.