Spammy keywords on a page

[mascotmike]

My client's website has a box of text on each page that is spammy and horrible to read and stuffed with keywords. The text boxes are there only for search engines as they mean nothing to humans. I say remove them as it must be doing more harm than good. However, my client is scared to remove them as the text has been there on each page for ten years and he is worried about a drop in visitor numbers if they are removed. Is he right to be worried?

[APICDA]

People do tend to become attached to things and resistant to change, that said, I would opt for pulling it.  They are unsightly and take up space..........

[AlanBleiweiss]

And if the site was truly hit by Panda, you can let your client know that every major search industry leader says to ensure recovery from Panda, every SEO best practice that can be done needs to be done.  There is no single factor to focus on.  So if there are boxes on pages that have no relevance to those pages, and are even POSSIBLY causing problems such as topical dilution, or in this case, keyword stuffery, they need to go.

So even if you remove them and there is a subsequent minor hit, the more important issue is long term recovery from Panda in this case.

[RyanKent]

Once you see the cached page updated in Google, you should be safe. Any ranking changes would happen immediately.

[mascotmike]

Thanks Alan. I took a few of the boxes away a month ago and nothing has happened even though the pages have been cached since then. How long do I have to wait though to be sure?

There are other major tasks to do as well. The site was hit by Panda in a bad way as it has a lot of duplicate content so that's being rewritten slowly, which makes testing tricky.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Only one way to find out.  Pull them and observe rankings, organic visits.  If those numbers drop, put the box back.  If the numbers rise again, you're onto something.

That's the nature of SEO. Without testing, it's impossible to know with 100% certainty what the outcome will be. It's your responsibility to build a case as to why they're harming things.

Has every other major task related to SEO best practices been performed?  If so, a 30 day test (checking two weeks after taking the box out), isn't unreasonable a process to test, but only if the owner is willing to risk it.

If they're not, that comes down to us needing to understand that sometimes our gut instinct isn't enough to cause site owners to let us experiment on their site.