Explaining Keyword Stuffing to SEO Clients

When you offer SEO services your clients often ask why you don't use the techniques being used on their competitor's web sites. Most often it's because it's a 'black hat' technique that, according to Search Engine Optimisation folklore, will eventually be punished by any search engine worth it's salt.

So what do you say when they are seeing that very technique in use across many of the top ranked sites? Good question!

What Constitutes Keyword Stuffing/Spamming?

As the name suggests keyword spamming or keyword stuffing relates to using your keywords/phrases excessively in your content. And not just your visible text content either.

If you are stuffing keywords in [alt] tags, [title] tags, tiny sized text, in text that is the same or similar colour as it's background, frames or similar then you are keyword spamming.

These days you most often see it manifest as a heap of text towards the bottom of web pages, particularly the homepage. The text is generally stuffed with repetitive words or phrases, often using poor grammar and overall sentence structure. The webmaster is only interested in getting search bots to read the keywords, human readers are practically ignored.

Why do they do it? They are hoping that it will boost their search engine rankings.

What's Google's Position?

The first thing you need to be aware of is that at this time Google at least does not look for, detect or punish keyword spammers automatically or programmatically. As Google insider Matt Cutts says on keyword stuffing on his blog "...Google reserves the right to do what we think is best to maintain the relevance of our search results, and that includes taking action on keyword stuffing."

Now although Google isn't sending it's robot army out to look for webmasters using this technique (yet), search engine spammers can be reported to Google via any Google Webmaster Tools account holder. I'm not sure anything is actually achieved after reporting however as many SEO discussion forums have threads about reported spammers holding onto their SERPs rankings.

Personally I get the feeling that when it comes to really dealing with keyword stuffing it's a "we would if we could, but we can't so we don't" situation.

What Do You Tell SEO Clients?

Assuming you are an ethical SEO consultant/company the you should always fight the good fight. This means informing your clients about white and black hat SEO techniques along with the pros and cons of each.

If you want an example of how technology eventually catches up with dirty tactics point to the infamous Google Bomb technique.

Also, it's worth remembering the point I made above about reporting spammers. If you think your competitors are not keeping an eye on you or willing to bring you down then it's only a matter of time before you disappear down a search engine black hole.