Can Your Site Get Penalized For Keyword Stuffing On An 'Untarged' Keyword?

[andersvin]

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!

[andersvin]

Excellent suggestions - thanks!

[masdigitalmedia]

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

[andersvin]

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.

[UnderRugSwept]

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.

[andersvin]

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...

[andersvin]

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?

[RuthBurrReedy]

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.

[UnderRugSwept]

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.

[masdigitalmedia]

Would you mind providing a site link?  It would be helpful to see an example.