What are the dangers in keyword stuffing?
While it was once a ‘white hat’ tactic, keyword stuffing is now purely seen as a ‘black hat’ tactic which is no longer viewed kindly by Google. In fact Matt Cutts, of Google, has stated:
“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. We are trying to make GoogleBot 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.”
The basic danger here is if you are seen as SEO writing or keyword stuffing, Google will lower your Page Rank, or worse they could remove your website from their listings altogether. That said, there’s nothing wrong with focusing on keyword density and working with it, but content should be unique, natural and informative – not just forcing keywords in for the sake of having them there.
Another major downside to keyword stuffing is that most customers will not stay on a site that encourages the practice. Whilst the general internet user won’t recognise it as an outreach tactic, they will notice that it makes content unwelcoming and, frankly, unreadable in many cases. When a customer feels uncomfortable with your website, they’ll immediately leave, taking their custom with them.