Keyword stuffing may promise short-term ranking success, but it poses long-term risks to the visibility and credibility of your website.
This is what lies behind keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing is an outdated SEO technique that aims to manipulate search engines by inserting excessive keywords. This approach may actually help you rank higher in search engine results in the short term, but it has negative consequences in the long term.
- If you repeat keywords excessively on your website in order to improve the ranking, you run the risk of making the text unnatural and therefore difficult to read. This could deter visitors to the website.
- Search engines like Google have also developed algorithms that detect and penalize keyword stuffing.
- What this means in concrete terms is that websites that are known for keyword stuffing are likely to be permanently downgraded in the search results.
Why keyword stuffing hurts you
For search engine optimization, you cannot avoid finding keywords and using them sensibly. But there are right and wrong ways to do this. Keyword stuffing is definitely one of the techniques you should avoid.
- Websites that engage in keyword stuffing risk being penalized by search engines. This in turn leads to you, your company and your website being less visible on the Internet.
- This is also because keyword stuffing can damage your credibility and trustworthiness as a legitimate website. Often, pages that are overloaded with keywords are associated with spam websites.
- Countless keywords crammed together also make texts unreadable, which in turn is seen as a negative user experience. Anyone who feels repelled rather than attracted to your website will quickly leave without actually clicking through with interest.
- A poor user experience can lead to a lower conversion rate and thus a loss of sales. This means that fewer website visitors become real customers.
- What’s more, it can cost you a lot of time and resources to restore a positive SEO rating after you’ve been penalized.