We are now inConcert Web Solutions, Inc.
Click Here

Keyword Stuffing

April 9th, 2009

Keyword stuffing is also known as spamindexing.

What is Keyword stuffing? We will allow Wikipedia.org to explain it….
Wikipedia says “Spamdexing involves a number of methods, such as repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system. Some consider it to be a part of search engine optimization, though there are many search engine optimization methods that improve the quality and appearance of the content of web sites and serve content useful to many users. Search engines use a variety of algorithms to determine relevancy ranking. Some of these include determining whether the search term appears in the META keywords tag, others whether the search term appears in the body text or URL of a web page. Many search engines check for instances of spamdexing and will remove suspect pages from their indexes. Also, people working for a search-engine organization can quickly block the results-listing from entire websites that use spamdexing, perhaps alerted by user complaints of false matches. The rise of spamdexing in the mid-1990s made the leading search engines of the time less useful.

The success of Google at both producing better search results and combating keyword spamming, through its reputation-based PageRank link analysis system, helped it become the dominant search site late in the 1990s. Although it has not been rendered useless by spamdexing, Google has not been immune to more sophisticated methods. Google bombing is another form of search engine result manipulation, which involves placing hyperlinks that directly affect the rank of other sites. Google first algorithmically combated Google bombing on January 25, 2007.”

Why it’s bad for your site?
In relative terms, it’s sneaky, and no search engine likes sneaky people. Ultimately you want to appear number 1, especially on Google, however they don’t take kindly to you tricking them out. This is old school and it did work, but only for a limited time. People were considering the keyword stuffing to be content and while it is words, it is not relevant, readable, and engaging content and that is why Google and the other major search engines modified their algorithms to correct the placement.

The reality is that you need to add good content to your site. If you don’t have the time, then hire someone to do it. There are many companies that can do this for you and for that matter there are many unemployed people right now in the U.S. looking for any part time work and those people can be great resources for you to have writing content for yourself.

If you don’t have the time or the funds, consider adding a syndicated content source. They are available on the internet and could possibly help, however this is considered a last resort in our opionion.

Matt Ward

Subscribe to RSS

Robots Text File

December 11th, 2008

Every site should have a robots.txt file. It can often be overlooked but it doesn’t take much to add one. Wikipedia says “The robot exclusion standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. Robots are often used by search engines to categorize and archive web sites, or by webmasters to proofread source code. The standard complements Sitemaps, a robot inclusion standard for websites.

A robots.txt file on a website will function as a request that specified robots ignore specified files or directories in their search. This might be, for example, out of a preference for privacy from search engine results, or the belief that the content of the selected directories might be misleading or irrelevant to the categorization of the site as a whole, or out of a desire that an application only operate on certain data.
For websites with multiple sub-domains, each sub-domain must have its own robots.txt file. If example.com had a robots.txt file but a.example.com did not, the rules that would apply for example.com will not apply to a.example.com.”

Subscribe to RSS