What are Google guidelines?
Google Webmaster Guidelines are a set of technical and design recommendations for webmasters and site owners. If followed they are supposed to improve site crawlability but also to increase the site's visibility in our index. In essence, building your site with these guidelines in mind is likely to help your site gain Google's trust and to perform well in the search results over time.
A part of our guidelines describes deceptive techniques, such as keyword stuffing, linking schemes or doorways just to name a few. While some assume these methods can potentially give your site a quick boost in the search engine results in fact over time their use is likely to harm your site's reputation and therefore impact its visibility in our index. Since Google is following its mission--to organize all world's information and make it universally accessible and useful--we want your site to perform well. That's why today we would like to put a spotlight on a particular dodgy method, that should be avoided but appears to become increasingly popular.
What is keyword stuffing?
The content of a website is one factor that search engines have been taking into account while analyzing sites. In the past, it might have been a safe assumption that increasing the number of keywords can improve a site's ranking. However, our algorithms evolved over time. These days, keywords constitute one factor of about 200 that we consider in the process of evaluating a site. Nonetheless, there are webmasters who try to artificially add keywords by simply repeating them below actual content like on the screenshot displayed below. Or they hide chunks of keywords either using style sheets or the same color for text and background. Some webmasters simply push loads of keywords and typos below the fold, where users are unlikely to see it. There are more methods then these, but there is no point in describing them all. Either way, they all are Google guidelines violations that over time are likely to push your site down in the rankings, rather then up. Although not effective, keyword stuffing seems to become a popular technique in our language. Webmasters seem to believe that by adding keywords in their sites they can rank higher, however in fact they are achieving the exact opposite effect.
Please keep in mind that stuffing your site with keywords is not a good use of your time. Instead we recommend webmasters to focus on adding original and compelling content and/or useful tools to their sites. That way a site's popularity can be increased staying within our guidelines. And since we get asked this sometimes: Yes, stuffing keywords in meta tags or title tags is not a good idea either. In fact it's a rather fruitless effort to trick Google algorithms.
What to do if you used to stuff your site with keywords?
If your site has been stuffed with keywords in any similar way to the methods described above, your site's visibility in the Google index might have suffered. In order to regain Google's trust, please have a look on our webmaster guidelines and adapt your site's design so it becomes compliant. In case you have any doubts regarding what to do, ask yourself the following questions: If there were no search engines, would you be considering this particular design? Would you place this content in a large font size, in a very visible way on the page? Do you want to hide the content from users or is it an important element for users? Having your website cleaned up, please submit a
reconsideration request. We take all incoming requests very seriously. Depending on the volume, the processing time can take up to a few weeks. Once your request has been reviewed, we will notify you through the Google Webmaster Tools message center.
How to report keyword stuffing?
If you come across keyword stuffing on sites indexed by Google or across any other violation described in our
guidelines please feel free to report them through the
authorized spam report. Doing so you are helping to improve the quality of our index and making the Internet a better place for everyone.
If you still have any questions regarding keyword stuffing or Google guidelines please join our
Arabic Webmaster Help Forum. You can also join our community if you want to share your thoughts on our products and services or if you are just curious to see what
Adel &
Younis, the Google guides, are up to ;-)
Posted by Adel Saoud, Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Team
