SEO Myths: Keyword Stuffing Increases Ranking

The internet is in a state of constant evolution. It is changing and adapting to the trends of its users as well as the preferences of search engines. In this new little set of articles, we will discuss the myths (and legends) of SEO.

Please Pass the Stuffing!

SEO Myth: Keyword Stuffing Increases My Rank on Search Engines

Back when SEO was just in it’s infancy and “PageRank” was the name of the game, the more that your website mentioned a specific keyword, the higher up in the rankings you would be for that keyword.  Logically this makes sense right? The more you mention a keyword, such as “Thanksgiving Stuffing,” your site must be all about Thanksgiving stuffing. It worked great for a while, and when you were looking for a specific topic, those loaded sites would be at the top of search results.

As time went on and people started to figure this out, they used shady methods to get their sites, or their client’s sites, onto the top of the listings by building a web page that looked something like this:

“There are a lot of thanksgiving stuffing recipes that I have tried over the years. Thanksgiving stuffing is a big part of my family get-togethers. My aunt will make thanksgiving stuffing, my mom will make thanksgiving stuffing, my little sister will make thanksgiving stuffing, and my cousin will make thanksgiving stuffing. We all have different kinds of ingredients that we put in our thanksgiving stuffing and want to be sure that each kind of thanksgiving stuffing is unique. We sure love thanksgiving and our thanksgiving stuffing.”

Pretty annoying, eh? As a human, you can tell that that is way over the top and is total spam. At the time, search engine engineers didn’t even think that this could happen.  Luckily with the changes in the algorithms, we are no longer seeing these kinds of sites at the top of our search results. More often than not, having too many keywords stuffed into your content will actually hurt your rankings.  If you are concerned at all about your percentage, talk to one of our account managers, and they will be happy to help you out.

So this myth is considered: Dead! Stuffing your page with keywords will not increase your ranking.