Keyword stuffing is an SEO trick that dates back many, many years – predating Google – and it is still periodically seen by sites that are ranking well in the search results.  But how bad is it to do it on a site?

The question came up on Twitter and John Mueller from Google clarified that keyword stuffing alone won’t result in a page being removed from the search index.

I don’t know the page, but IMO keyword stuffing shouldn’t result in removal from the index.

But before you think that you should stuff those keywords back on a page, remember that the Google Quality Rater Guidelines specifically call out keyword stuffing as something that should be rated as lowest quality.   And loading keywords is also against the webmaster guidelines.

And while Google says they won’t be removed, as John Mueller notes, this is a very old spam trick and Google has lots of experience with it.  And there are pages that could be ranking well in spite of the fact they keyword stuff, simply because their other ranking signals are powerful enough.

Yeah, but if we can ignore boring keyword stuffing (this was popular in the 90’s; search engines have a lot of practice here), there’s sometimes still enough value to be found elsewhere.

And while they might not be removed for this reason alone, it could definitely be a demotion signal for rankings and could prevent a page from ranking as well as it could.  And if a page is just keyword stuffing, that could still be removed as a manual action.

Also, from a user experience point of view, site visitors are also becoming more savvy to this kind of trick, and having a mass of keywords at the bottom of a page tends to be noticeable when someone goes that far down the page.  It could definitely devalue a site in the visitor’s eyes.

And of course, Mueller also reminds people it is better to spend the time improving your own site than focusing on other sites you cannot change.

It’s usually more actionable to focus on your own sites, rather than to focus on “why is someone else’s site ranking above mine when I don’t think it’s as good as mine” … We use over 200 factors for ranking, the nice part is that you don’t have to get them all perfect.