Do You Practice Keyword Stuffing? Stop it Right NOW! : Beauty Blogging Vol.7

Keyword stuffing – In one word, is dangerous! I’m not scaring you off but I thought I’d share my experience with you all so that you can decide whether to use or drop the tactic, for your blog’s good. When I was thinking to write on it someday, co-incidentally, Nupur sent me the following message.

Hey Lancy,

Since you did a post on Google adsense approval, why don’t you do one on keyword stuffing and things like that which bloggers do these days to manipulate their site’s ranking?

It’ll be innovative and at the same time, informative to those who do so either intentionally or unintentionally.

I read a review where in the product’s name was typed 12 times in the review. How does Google point out that it’s keyword stuffing? Does it deduct money from the blogger’s adsense account?

Just too curious about all this. I thought that by merely visiting a blog which has Google ads on it, a blogger makes money. Read that post of yours and realized that there’s something called Cost per Click (CPC)

First up, thank you Nupur for the message! This post today is because of you.

Secondly, I do not think bloggers do it to manipulate their search rankings but as you said, they either intentionally or unintentionally do keyword stuffing in order to gain a LOT of traffic from the search engine! I’m surprised you know so much about such stuff. You’d definitely make one good blogger, Nupur! You’ve have got an amazing writing style too!

And no, Google doesn’t deduct money from the adsense account if a blogger practices keyword stuffing. But it affects their search engine ranking position and that affects the traffic; and loss of traffic = loss of revenue, so yes, it does affect a blogger’s earnings indirectly! I shall write more on CPC and stuff on coming volumes!

Now coming to keyword stuffing, does it really work!? – NO! But it used to work once! That is a good number of years ago. Now that the Google algorithms are strict (the crawlers work very smartly!), keyword stuffing does more bad than good. It almost does NO good! I was a victim of keyword stuffing as I used to practice it a few years ago, believing Google would list my reviews/posts on the first page. Did it help? Not really! What did I get in return? My site got penalized during an algorithm update losing 90% of its traffic (adding to the bad links and negative seo! More on that on another post!)

After the incident, I said goodbye to keyword stuffing! (I don’t even do keyword research now!) I stopped repeating the product name so many times on a review. It’s on the title only; if needed, I use the product name in between my reviews causally. But I don’t do this ‘stuffing’ mistake anymore. It’s not only annoying to your readers, but also to the new smart search engines! If you’re not aware of what I’m talking about, do refer the lines below.

“XYZ Face Wash Review. Price of XYZ Face Wash, Ingredients of XYZ Face Wash, My Experience with XYZ Face Wash, Would I Repurchase XYZ Face Wash…”

Here, the XYZ face wash is the keyword and you’re stuffing it into the review! Bad move.

What do I do instead to make my reviews/posts reach the readers better? What do I do to improve their SERP (search engine ranking position!) Honestly, I do not do anything extra. I stopped doing SEO (no plans to change my mind in near future!) but I only have these three columns on my reviews currently – My Views, Rating and Final Word. (I suggest my writers to follow the same format!) I’d even stopped the pro-con format as ‘my views’ would be covering those already! I may include the pro-con part later but no ideas as of now.

For now, I want my reviews to be simple, readable and neat! (along with clear images!) As long as they’re unique, Google will feature them on their top pages! (Experience!) Same goes with the DIY and tutorial posts, as well!

Overall, content is the king; SEO is not!

SEO might help (when you do it right!) but as much as the quality and uniqueness of your content. Hence, I suggest my fellow bloggers to stop using the keyword stuffing trick; instead concentrate on your content. Improve the quality of your content. Promote them on social media! Traffic is sure to come! :)

Nevertheless, I’m in no way asking you not to do keyword research/use keywords on your posts. If you think what you do right now is doing your blog good, continue doing that. I just shared my personal experience just in case..

P.S: If you have any inputs on this topic, please drop them on the comment section below!