Keyword Stuffing - How much is too much?

mickyfu said:

5% is too high, oh well looks like my articles from Natasha Nixon are fucked then.

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Ideal KD: 3-4 in 100 words article.

keyword stuffing is obsolete. there were times it had more weight, maybe in terms of relevancy such in the more keywords you stuffed in, the more relevant your article to that topic. but nowadays it more spells penalty

keyword density only came into spotlight because of keyword stuffing, we wanted to fool the algo in a safest possible way, aren't we? and that's what keyword density is all about. but indeed, it is still important as parameter to check whether our article is "natural". i said natural in quote, because i don't think the algo is smart enough to recognize an article is natural. but i do believe the algo can detect unnatural article.... like from the keywords you stuff in.

if our article is well written, we won't have to worry about letting the algo know what our article is about without any keyword stuffing and usually we don't have to worry about keyword density either. otherwise, it's not natural and not well written article, simple.

i don't believe in magical numbers, because i don't think the algo pick it as important factors. for example, the article length, i don't think the algo put more weight on your article because it has xxx words count. BUT.. if we have long articles what it would mean? the longer users stay and reading our articles. THAT's the real important factor. IF they stay, the longer the article become good. also it can explain why some xxxx words count article don't rank at all, if the bounce rate sucks, etc

the same thing apply to internal linking. i don't think algo put more weight on it than just navigation. BUT... with internal linking it means there's a higher chance that users will stay and clicking our other articles. that's the real important factor.

understand your purpose, IMO, nowadays we only need keyword density to avoid the spam detection, in case the article is not well written in natural way. and keyword stuffing... is not even a thing anymore. at least, it's my myths i believe.

Before keyword stuffing officially became the poster child for black hat operations as we know it today, there was a time when it actually stood as one of the most potent SEO strategies on the web. Industry experts like the team from the Kissmetrics blog point out that this period of the Internet’s history was a veritable “Wild West” environment where virtually any tactic – no matter how dubious – was fair game.

What about things where you've implemented a tagging system for articles? Each article has a "category" and that category is typically the keyword. Often it'll show Title - Date - Category and then I have a snippet (paragraph) of the article shown.

Keyword Stuffing is something that doesn't work in 2017. In fact, it's going to demote your Ranking.

But wait, if keyword stuffing doesn't work, what does? This does:

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/rank-on-google-without-building-links-in-under-100-white-hat-seo-2017.950085/

Cheers!!

We follow the "1% keyword density" rule when we write the articles of our clients.
That's for the main keyword. If our client has secondary keywords or LSI terms, we mention each of them once or twice.

The Yoast SEO plugin also recommends the implementation of a 1% keyword density for the focus keyword.

In my experience 5% is too high I have it around 1.8% on one of my websties but remember there is no magic number.

mickyfu said:

5% is too high, oh well looks like my articles from Natasha Nixon are fucked then.

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Would love to bang her, she does the best articles.

Here is a dark secret of SEO:

Keyword stuffing still works magic, you just have to know where to stuff them.

Article itself is not a good place. The more you stuff, the less readable it becomes, the bigger is your bounce rate, the lower is you rank.

But comments... 500 comments, stuffed with variations of keywords and LSI phrases can bring you so much traffic that you wouldnt be able to handle it.

Everyone who mentioned test got it right

my experience is every niche is different

what I found is highly competitive niches there seems to be low tolerance for keyword stuffing

the other thing I find many forget it is not just about your article that is counted for keywords
you need to consider the whole page, navigation, ads etc... as part of your page content

here is an example of a test site I purposely keyword stuffed and still got 3 page one rankings



I consider my content density with stop words and without stop words

one page has over 11% for keyword density and still I was on page one for a important keyword for this niche

this was without stop words, I think just the article itself was close to 20% not counting the other stuff on the page which diluted the keyword count

the answer is test, it all depends, picking numbers out of the sky from what others recommend is guessing

knowing the truth in your niche is what counts and you can only do this by testing

I do this all the time, this is not a one time shot, this is only a test site, to show the rules can be bent if you know

also notice one site did not have the complete keyword on the page and still was on page one

test, test and test some more

T2tkid said:

Agreed with this. I saw a site targeting medium/high competitive KWs, he only has the KWs in meta and heading. And he is ranking well. There is no need for keyword stuffing.

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I dont agree with this because if you have Big Role Niches where are the money as pharma and adult I saw few websites who are ranking with awful design but keyword stuffing on max border density bring them on 1 place on google.

checked a site with 10% keyword density, still rank for few years. Don't trust gurus, trust your eyes. Search for a keyword and analyse the top 1 site.