Keyword Abuse From Rise To Fall

Link farming is one of the most popular form of Black Hat SEO used in the past. However, other than Link farming, the use of On-Page Black Hat SEO techniques have also been equally popular in the past. There are many forms of On-Page SEO techniques which were known to be used for Black Hat SEO in the past. One of the most popular form is keyword stuffing. So what is keyword stuffing?

Abuse of Keywords
Keyword stuffing is one of the oldest forms of Black Hat SEO in which a website is stuffed with many keywords both in the codes and in the content itself. There are many techniques used to stuff keywords inside a website. One technique used by many webmasters is to blend the text with the background color. Another popularly used technique is the use of "Z" positioning in CSS.

According to SEO Philippines consultants, CSS "Z" positioning is used to place text "behind" an image which therefore makes the text out of view for visitors but not for search engine spiders. The use of CSS absolute positioning is also used to have the text positioned far from the page center are all common techniques. However, hidden text is not always spamdexing: it can also be used to enhance accessibility.

Other than the content, keyword stuffing is also used inside the code of a website through the use of meta tags and "Noscript" tags. Noscript tags, such as Alt Tags and Title Tags, were popularly and abusively used in keyword stuffing. While they are a valid optimization method for displaying an alternative representation of scripted content, they may be abused, since search engines may index content that is invisible to most visitors.

Meta tags were also one of the most popular places in a website used for keyword stuffing. According to SEO Philippines consultants, the technique usually involves repeating keywords in the Meta tags, and using meta keywords that are unrelated to the site's content.

Fall of Keyword Stuffing
Although similar to Link Farming in terms of popularity in the past, the use of keyword stuffing have now been widely ineffective. Keyword stuffing is completely outdated and adds no value to rankings today. In particular, Google no longer gives good rankings to pages employing this technique. According to SEO Philippines consultants, by 2005, many invisible text techniques were easily detected by major search engines. By 2005, many invisible text techniques were easily detected by major search engines. The use of meta tags for keyword stuffing has also been ineffective since 2005.