Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

This is another one of my favorite search engine ranking myths: if you ‘overstuff’ your page with keywords the search engines will penalize you in their rankings. For example: your site sells lamps. How many times should you use the word lamp on your homepage or, more importantly, how ‘dense’ should the word ‘lamp’ be in your copy? Once per sentence too much? How about every other word? How about EVERY word? If every word on your homepage were ‘lamp,’ would you be de-listed from Google and Yahoo?

Most SEO consultants paint a complicated picture of search engines as sophisticated algorithms that mere mortals cannot possibly understand - but I don’t buy it. My theory is that search engine algorithms are lazy and a little stupid so the keyword test is the perfect way to see just how ’smart’ the search engines really are. The conventional wisdom is that keyword density for a page should be somewhere between 1% and 7% to be considered ‘optimized.’ Not too much, not too little - just right for those finicky search engines.

So here’s the set up: 3 pages on the same domain, each with different keyword densities ranging from 6% (our ‘optimized’ page), 28% for the ‘overstuffed’ page, and 100% for the search engine gamers’ paradise platter. Now it’s time for you to guess - Which page is on top in Google? If you said the optimized page, you’re dead wrong - in fact, you picked the poorest performing page. The page with 100% keyword density is on top, next comes the 28% page, followed in last place (and a supplemental result no less) is the 6% page. Yahoo! appears to have a slightly more sophisticated palate, choosing the 28% page for the top spot but it still has love for the 100% page in second place. No Yahoo! love at all for the 6% ‘optimized’ page.

I know what you’re thinking: this just can’t be, it’s too simple. Remember that our test is conducted in a bit of a vacuum and that we’ve tried hard to isolate the keyword effect from any other factors (like pagerank, title tags, meta description, etc.). I personally don’t want to believe the results because it just doesn’t seem fair that a page packed to the brim with a single keyword can rank above pages with actual useful content. I’d love to hear from anyone with a counter example…

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 7:44 am and is filed under Search engine ranking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.