Steering Clear of Search Engine Spam - Keyword Stuffing and Hidden Text
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Keyword Stuffing: You hear about this all the time, and it’s the classic example of way too much of a good thing. Yes, you need to have your targeted keywords incorporated into the content of your site. It makes sense; if you’re going to have a web site that talks about dog training, you’re going to use the phrase “dog training” a lot. But if you use it too much, the search engines will think you’re actively trying to manipulate the results rather than writing good content and letting the keywords fall where they may.
How much is too much? It’s hard to find agreement on this, but iProspect recommends no more than six or seven times for every 200 words on the site, or about three percent of your content. MSN specifically hates webmasters who engage in “Loading pages with irrelevant words in an attempt to increase a page’s keyword density. This includes stuffing ALT tags that users are unlikely to view.” Yahoo!’s condemnation is more general, disliking “Pages that harm accuracy, diversity or relevance of search results” and “Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking.” Google also generally disapproves of pages that employ tricks without specifically mentioning keyword stuffing.
Hidden or Invisible Text: It’s a rule of thumb that you’re supposed to build your web site for your human visitors. Why would you put something in the main content of a page that is specifically designed to be visible to the search engines rather than your visitors? Hidden text is designed to be the same color as the background of the web page it’s on. This hides it from visitors but lets search engine spiders see it clearly. When it’s done as an intentional dirty tactic, it’s usually combined with some variation of keyword stuffing.
Hidden text is a form of “cloaking,” or showing the search engines one kind of content and your visitors another. Google comes down on both the general practice of cloaking and the specific practice of hidden text, hard. “Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as ‘cloaking.’” And on its list of specific “don’ts,” Google admonishes webmasters to “Avoid hidden text or hidden links” and “Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects” (more on that last in a bit). Yahoo doesn’t want to see webmasters engaging in “The use of text that is hidden from the user” and Microsoft concurs, insisting that “You should use only text and links that are visible to users.”
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