Can Your Site Get Penalized For Keyword Stuffing On An 'Untarged' Keyword?
-
My site has dropped since the EMD/Panda 20 roll out and I am looking for reasons why.
I am looking at Keyword Stuffing as one potential problem.
My web site is on the topic of WordPress Security with that being the main keyword I want to target.
Now I can limit the number of occurrences of 'wordpress security' to below the recommended 15, but it is impossible to do this for 'wordpress' without severely compromising the user experience.
I've got other content on topics such as WordPress Backup and WordPress Security Plugins etc, so obviously the word 'wordpress' is bound to appear frequently.
Is there a risk that Google will penalize me for Keyword Stuffing on 'wordpress' and thus pull down the site or page for other keywords?
Or would it simply mean I won't be able to rank for 'wordpress' (which I am quite happy about)?
Thanks!
-
Excellent suggestions - thanks!
-
Hi Anders,
I think Ruth made some great points in her comments above. I read over your content and several things occur to me. If this were my project, I may consider reorganizing some of the information on the home page.
Further below in the page, you have some items that appear to be FAQ(ish). You might find an opportunity to move some of this content into another page, but create a call to action (anchored text links) to them. This helps you gain traffic deeper into your site content, so the home page asks the question, which do well. The links draw them further into the site and engages them to convert (download).
Also, I'm seeing the alt image tag text report the use of "The WordPress Security Checklist" several times. I would consider using this term once versus the three occurrences.
The strengths that you have is the keyword term in the URL, which is a huge benefit. Ruth's comments on using WP versus wordpress is insightful, because it bolsters the URL. I would scale back to find a bit more balance and you'll get there. You can always scale back up, as you see fit.
Also, here is a flag to consider:
Multiple meta description tags found!
I'm sure others may have more specific input, but this is what I would consider adjusting. The joy of SEO is research, implement, test, and modify...
Best of Luck,
andrew
-
OK, when I run the On Page Optimization tool on the competitors site it only shows 16 occurrences of the term 'wordpress security'.
The remaining occurrences appeared in a twitter widget, which I guess is loaded in an iframe or by javascript or something like that...
There were 34 occurrences of the word 'wordpress' on the competitor site.
-
Yup, makes sense now. And try not to focus too much on an actual percentage when it comes to keyword frequency. Google never set a standard; that is just some experienced SEO's best educated estimation.
-
Someone on the Google Webmaster forum also suggested the 'read out loud' test.
I like it, and did go through the text with fresh eyes. I managed to make some good changes and build in some more variation.
I think I might just be too focused on the limit of 15...
-
Sorry for being unclear... was worried that if Google was going to penalize me for overusing 'wordpress' I'd suffer for the word 'wordpress security' too...
Does that make sense?
-
If you're suffering from Panda, another thing to look at is how much content you have overall. If you've got a small amount of text and it has high recurrence of keywords, that's a bad sign for Panda. A tip I like to use when it comes to keyword stuffing is to read your text out loud. If it sounds unnatural, you're probably using the keyword too often. I would focus on creating some new quality content and on making your language sound natural.
If you feel like you're saying Wordpress too much but it's negatively impacting your site, you could use "WP" or other variations to add some variety.
-
The first thing that came to my mind is that you may not be intending to target this specific word, but because it's stuffed throughout the page, Google may think you're targeting it.
I'm also confused as to what the issue is if you're afraid Google will think you're keyword stuffing and won't rank you for ''Wordpress'' but you say that you actually don't want to rank for that anyway.
I'm just going to go with the standard best practice here and say to write the article for your users, not Google. Write it the way you would if Google did not exist. Google's algorithms are smarter than you think, and penalization of quality content that is intended for user experience is not something that generally happens.
-
Would you mind providing a site link? It would be helpful to see an example.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Will German meta data help an English USA-based site get found in Germany?
I think I already know the answer to this, but I'd love a second opinion. If you add German meta data to some web pages will it help those pages turn up in search results in Germany?I'm assuming not. It's an English, USA based site, doing well here for English searches - and I don't want to mess that up. A German site is being planned, but this client is hoping the English site could be found in the meantime. ~Caro
On-Page Optimization | | Caro-O0 -
Home page keyword in url
I have been looking into SEO for a few weeks now trying to perfect a homepage. Going through various sources on MOZ, and other examples out there on the internet, I keep seeing that you should have your keyword in the URL of the page. The homepage is the page most people want to rank the highest in google searches, however, you cannot put the keyword in the URL as most home page URLs are simply /. Should I actually make the home like this: www.example.com/key-word-example? I would imagine this would not be the normal for many users and would seem like it's not the home page.
On-Page Optimization | | Matthew_smart0 -
Is there a limit to the number of duplicate pages pointing to a rel='canonical ' primary?
We have a situation on twiends where a number of our 'dead' user pages have generated links for us over the years. Our options are to 404 them, 301 them to the home page, or just serve back the home page with a canonical tag. We've been 404'ing them for years, but i understand that we lose all the link juice from doing this. Correct me if I'm wrong? Our next plan would be to 301 them to the home page. Probably the best solution but our concern is if a user page is only temporarily down (under review, etc) it could be permanently removed from the index, or at least cached for a very long time. A final plan is to just serve back the home page on the old URL, with a canonical tag pointing to the home page URL. This is quick, retains most of the link juice, and allows the URL to become active again in future. The problem is that there could be 100,000's of these. Q1) Is it a problem to have 100,000 URLs pointing to a primary with a rel=canonical tag? (Problem for Google?) Q2) How long does it take a canonical duplicate page to become unique in the index again if the tag is removed? Will google recrawl it and add it back into the index? Do we need to use WMT to speed this process up? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | dsumter0 -
Redirecting pages (old site to new site)
I have a question- there is one location, one set of pages for both the old and new site on the same host environment so when I did the redirect it get into a loop trying to redirect from itself to itself Not sure how its gonna affect SEO. Will pages get hit for duplicate content?
On-Page Optimization | | Yanez0 -
Are Meta-keywords coming back?
I'm currently doing some benchmarking for a big realtor site here in México, while looking at the biggest players in the US I noticed most if not all are using the Keywords meta tag in their detail listings. I've been really open to my client about not using this tag at all given the current common knowledge but when sites like: Trulia.com, Realtor.com, appartments.com and the like, are using them I'm second guessing their utility. Does anyone have any insights on this? Should or should not we use meta-keywords? On a side note, there is some interesting microdata going on, in those sites.
On-Page Optimization | | makote1 -
Is keyword stuffing relative to total copy length or an absolute rule?
My seomoz report has warned me about 38 occurrences of a keyword on a page, is that always too many? 19 of them are in my reviews tab, "I love KEYWORD", etc. I expect to get more reviews and more keyword mentions. If I had to keep that page to 15 or fewer, I would have no reviews tab.
On-Page Optimization | | Brocberry0 -
Checking for content originality in a site
two part question on original content How would you go about checking if a site holds original content accept the long search quary within Google? ans also if I find many sites carrying my content and I am the original source should I replace the content? thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ciznerguy0 -
Is there any benefit in on-site duplicate content?
I have about 50 internal pages on my site that I want to add a "Do it yourself tutorial" to in an effort to build the quality of the pages. Is this going to de-value the content if I put it on all 50 pages? It's difficult to write similar content 50 different ways.
On-Page Optimization | | BradBorst0