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
-
Meta keywords and meta news keywords
I've got a question regarding this. So normally Meta keywords it is not relevant and we shouldn't use them, however there are opinions that we can use them as these are signals for other Search Engines. Meta news keywords - are ok to be used in the news sites. what is your opinion on using both of them on a news site? Can this help, or harm? thanks, Irina
On-Page Optimization | | InformMedia0 -
How do I cure 'overly dynamic' url's on an e-commerce website?
I've just launched an e-commerce website selling hosiery and have received aa report from SEO Moz regarding overly dynamic URL's. How do I resolve this issue - in words of one syllable please, I'm new to SEO! Here are three exapmles of over 120: http://www.yosassy.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=1&page=2 http://www.yosassy.com/index.php?route=product/product&filter_tag=&page=1&product_id=57 http://www.yosassy.com/index.php?route=product/product&filter_tag=&page=1&product_id=64 Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | lindsayjhopkins0 -
Keyword canibalization
Hi, I'm ranking for 'bodybuilding schema' with two separate pages (see attachment). Is this a problem? I heard that's it's better to only have one page ranking per keyword. If so, how do I prevent this? Thanks! Jasper MhcOI
On-Page Optimization | | Japking0 -
I think my site's HTML is good but I get 22 Invalid markup erros?
Most are all related to things like facebook like buttons and such. I'm using DOCTYPE 4.01 Traditional but no good. Any ideas? www.jaaron-wood-countertops.com
On-Page Optimization | | JAARON0 -
Site Redesign: Potential Problems?
We're looking at a cleanup of our site and making our navigation menu simpler and more visual. The problem is there's a massive fear that we will incur some sort of SEO hit at a time when we can ill afford one. The bulk of the changes are around some tertiary pages that have some SEO value but are not primary targets or traffic sources. The pages with content aren't moving URLs or changing, nor is the core content of the site, just the template. The new template, I feel, is easier to navigate and easier to spider (menus are flyout divs with images). So are there any tips or tricks to changing the layout of your site without hurting SEO? Anything we need to avoid?
On-Page Optimization | | Highland0 -
Where this keyword comes from?
I have a ON-PAGE optimized website, but seomoz research tool says that 24 pages are F graded, and i was checking the keywords and i noticed that the keywords seomoz research tool was analising wasnt the ones that i used. Let me explain its like this: My Keyword is : Santa and seomoz is running the keyword : Santa Claus Where did the tool got that Keyword from? Thank you
On-Page Optimization | | dmunchen0 -
Monitor site loading speeds
We all know that site loading speed is important for google ( and getting more important), and currently we are considering moving to a dedicated server. But I would like to measure pur current loading times and compare them to our competitors. I know that webmaster tools shows you your loading times, but its seems a bit random with its results, and I know analytics also now records speed, but the sample sizes seems to be too low. When I googled website load times, I got a load of different free tools but they seem to give conflicting results e.g one said that our avg kb load time was 0.02sec and our competitor was 0.01, but a different site says our sites loads in 1.7 secs and our competitor loads in 11sec (our home pages have similar total file size for our homepage. ) Also what would be useful would be a way to monitor of website loading speed to see when it slows down, so we can figure out why. Does anyone know of any good reliable programs or sites that does this?
On-Page Optimization | | eunaneunan0 -
How many keywords / phrases can you SEO for?
Might sound like a bit of a daft question to you pro's but here it goes... I am been doing in house SEO for a company for a short while and since I have been managing it things have moved quickly in the right direction but I find myself limiting our SEO efforts to three key terms. Is this usual? The reason I am doing this is because I find that on page SEO is only really possible with those amount of terms (with regards to title, description, key word density, seo copy, on page links etc). I guess that what I trying to stay is: If I push on page opitimastion to more key terms will it be detrimantal to our current efforts? and Is SEO possible for additional key phrases which are not on page optimised?
On-Page Optimization | | RikkiD220