Keyword Stuffing - Ecommerce websites
-
Hey Mozzers,
Im undertaking a content audit and its going very well, we have written some better content for the first set of pages, it still needs some improvement but we have a good base and starting point from which we can make an SEO log and work on it over time. For the content I used the following formula for how many times to include a keyword
Word Count / Length of Keyword. (eg. 600 words / 3 word keyword = 200). Then 1-4% of this (2-8 times).
This has worked well for me in the past and has been a good base guide. I have ran the pages through Moz optimiser and every single page hit an A for keyword page optimisation. However many of the pages failed on keyword stuffing, which obviously has high priority.
My dilemma is that, moz counts 15 as the cut off for keyword stuffing with the written text we have done really well with using it a set number of times. But these pages are product category pages. The keyword in the extreme of cases is listed 7-9 times in the side nav menu. 7-9 times in the product category listings.
Take for example *** it is optimised for thermometers (i know it a tough single word keyword, and we have fairly modest aims with it, im using it here for example purposes). The word is used a good number of times within the article but is sent through the roof with the links to the sub categories. This page for example mentions the keyword 30 times.
Can anybody suggest any ways to improve on this? Is how we display the categories in the nav bar and in the page excessive?
As always many thanks!
-
You're very welcome
-Andy
-
Brilliant, thanks andy much appreciated. Valuable feedback as always
-
What makes it "less of an issue" if the words are within the menu structure? Is there some info you could provide that backs this up?
Google has never really counted what is in the menu as page content. Some mega-menus are huge and carry many more occurrences of words than you have. They are pretty smart in that respect.
One thing you could do, is break the menu up so you have a heading of "Thermometers" and then list the types below that?
As another follow up question, the text uses the singular version 7 times and the plural 10. Would these be seen as the same word in the context of keyword stuffing?
Yes - Stemmed words are seen as the same. If you look in your Webmaster Tools account (Google Index --> Content Keywords), you will see words that are used and the variants of those words. As an example from a client I am working with at the moment.
|
- recruitment, recruit, recruiting, recruited, recruits
|
I suspect you will see Thermometer and Thermometers as variants.
-Andy
-
Thanks for the feedback Andy,
Its always nice to here a a fairly straight forward "that doesn't sound natural" it lets us know we need to review it.
What makes it "less of an issue" if the words are within the menu structure? Is there some info you could provide that backs this up?
I will look to reduce the keyword usage in light of what you have said
As another follow up question, the text uses the singular version 7 times and the plural 10. Would these be seen as the same word in the context of keyword stuffing?
-
Keyword stuffing is always a tricky one as sometime common sense means that there are multiple mentions of a word, but if it is in the menu structure, then it is seen as less of an issue. However, when I look at that page, there are a lot of occurrences in the content and when reading that, it actually sounds quite unnatural. 17 mentions in just a few hundred words is more than I would be comfortable with.
-Andy
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
-
Anchor Text to Rank for a Keyword
Is it still possible to use anchor text to rank for a keyword that is not present on the landing page? Or are there any alternatives?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Potential keyword cannibalization?
Hi, I'm doing an audit of a site for a very competitive term (project management software). The site ranks for its root domain on the second page. They have a lot of other non-blog pages that are geared towards longer tail versions that include that term (project management software pricing, project management tool comparison, etc). My question is: are those pages cannibalizing potential search traffic? Should they just stick to the one page (root domain) and include those longtail keywords on the page instead of creating various pages that seem to possibly be cannibalizing traffic? Is this a fair conclusion that these other pages is causing them to rank lower for the main head term?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Website can't break into Google Top100 for main keywords, considering 301 Redirect to a new domain
A little background on our case. Our website, ex: http://ourwebsite.com was officially live in December 2015 but it wasn't On-Site optimized and we haven't done any Off-site SEO to it. In April we decided to do a small redesign and we did it an online development server. Unfortunately, the developers didn't disallow crawlers and the website got indexed while we were developing it on the development server. The development version that got indexed in Google was http://dev.web.com/ourwebsite We learned that it got indexed when we migrated the new redesigned website to the initial domain. When we did the migration we decided to add www and now it looks like: http://www.ourwebsite.com Meanwhile, we deleted the development version from the development server and submitted "Remove outdated content" from the development server's Search Console. This was back in early May. It took about 15-20 days for the development version to get de-indexed and around 30 days for the original website (http://www.ourwebsite.com) to get indexed. Since then we have started our SEO campaign with Press Releases, Outreach to bloggers for Guest and Sponsored Posts etc. The website currently has 55 Backlinks from 44 Referring domains (ahrefs: UR25, DR37) moz DA:6 PA:1 with various anchor text. We are tracking our main keywords and our brand keyword in the SERPs and for our brand keyword we are position #10 in Google, but for the rest of the main (money) keywords we are not in the Top 100 results in Google. It is very frustrating to see no movement in the rankings for the past couple of months and our bosses are demanding rankings and traffic. We are currently exploring the option of using another similar domain of ours and doing a complete 301 Redirect from the original http://www.ourwebsite.com to http://www.ournewebsite.com Does this sound like a good option to you? If we do the 301 Redirect, will the link-juice be passed from the backlinks that we already have from the referring domains to the new domain? Or because the site seems "stuck," would it not pass any power to the new domain? Also, please share any other suggestions that we might use to at least break into the Top 100 results in Google? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanielGorsky0 -
Keyword position history?
Are there any tools out there to see historical positions of keywords for competitors? I haven't been tracking the keywords, just wondered if there is any cached data anywhere?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Keyword targeting
Hi guys, Are there any restrictions around targeting for keywords? For eg: a competitors name can we target for that keyword? Would appreciate some advice around this Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may1 -
Are these URLs too Keyword-packed?
Hi guys, Here is the URL: http://www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists/dog-stores-mailing-list.html The target keywords are "Dog stores mailing list" and "Dog stores mailing lists" Does having "mailing-list" and "mailing-lists" in my URL hurt me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Website change of address
Hi Everyone, I apologize if the answer to this questions is obvious, but I wanted some input on how changing our web address of our site will affect our SERP. We are looking to change our website address from a.com to b.com due to rebranding of our company (primarly to expand our product line as our current url and company name are restricting). I understand that this can be done using 301 direct and via webmaster tools with google. My question is how does this work exactly? Will our old website address show in SERP rankings, and when a user clicks on the listing are they redirected to our new address? With regards to building new links from press releases etc, do we have links point to our new web address or the old one in order to increase SERP? Does google see our old address and new address as the same website and therefor it does not matter where inbound links point to and both will increase our ranking positions? It took 6 years of in house seo to get our website to rank on the first page of all the major search engines for our keywords, so we am being very cautious before we do anything. Thanks everyone for your input, it is greatly appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AgentMonkey0 -
Keyword as domain- worth buying it?
Hi, I just noticed that a top keyword for our industry is available as a domain, but for around $2,500.00 USD. For example, www.chicagoplumber.com. If we already have a pretty well established online identity as, let's say, www.chicagopipes.com, would it be worth buying the new domain and making it our primary? Thanks for your feedback! -Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WillWatrous0