Keyword stuffing and hidden text
Repeating the same words a hundred times, or writing them in white on a white background: the two oldest cheats in search optimization, why Google names them in its rules, and how to recognize them. Punished practices series, part two.
We start with the oldest cheats, because they keep coming back in new clothes, and because they still appear, by name, in Google’s spam policies.
Keyword stuffing
The naive idea: if Google ranks pages that contain the words of the query, a page that contains them a hundred times will rank a hundred times better. Hence those paragraphs you still come across: “Your plumber in Fribourg for all plumbing repairs. Our plumbing company in Fribourg handles…” Google calls this practice keyword stuffing and files it explicitly under spam: lists of towns piled up with no content of their own, repetition to the point where it no longer resembles language, blocks of phone numbers with no added value.
Why it’s punished: the page lies about its substance. It imitates the signals of a rich page without having the content, and every reader who lands on it leaves having wasted their time. Why it’s also bad business, penalty aside: the real customer actually reads the page, and a page written for a robot drives away precisely the person it was meant to convince. The part on writing to be found made the same point positively: using the customer’s words, once, in the right place, beats ten repetitions.
Not to be confused: naming your town and your trade on your pages is not stuffing, it’s information. The line is crossed when the repetition no longer serves the reader but the counter.
Hidden text and links
A sneakier version of the same move: since stuffed text is unreadable, let’s hide it. White text on a white background, zero-size fonts, a paragraph pushed off the screen, words concealed behind an image: the rule lists them precisely. Add hidden links, a link placed on a punctuation mark or on an undetectable word, which exists for the robot but not for the eye.
Here the unfairness is chemically pure: the content is built so that the engine and the human see two different things. It’s the same principle as cloaking, to which a whole part is devoted later, at the scale of a paragraph rather than a page.
An honest distinction, which Google makes itself: collapsed content a visitor can open, an accordion of questions and answers, a tab, is not hidden text. The criterion is intent: hidden from the user but served to the robot is spam; folded away for comfort but one gesture from view is layout.
The customer test
One test covers both practices: read the page out loud, and select all its text with the mouse. If the reading is painful through repetition, or if the selection reveals lines you had never seen, you know. Run this test on your own site if a provider has “taken care of it”: it’s your domain that carries the risk.
Next part: links that get bought, swapped and scattered, and why rigged word-of-mouth is treated most severely of all.
Who writes these notes
This journal is kept by the workshop that designs and maintains the house’s websites. Everything described here, the Search Console, internal links, the business profile, is part of the work delivered with a site: if you would rather someone took care of it, that is precisely the trade.