META Keyword Punishment

I tried a little keyword stuffing in the meta keyword tag a few days ago in an effort to boost my ranking and have discovered a serious drop in ranking instead.

All keywords were relevant and included in the page but I remember reading once that you shouldn't use the same word more than twice in your meta keywords? Is this correct?

I think maybe this has caused my drop.

Any thoughts or similar experiences?

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What is the search engine that you are reffering to? Google is not giving any weight to meta keywords anyway.

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...from the google webmaster blog :

Thanks for asking, Glen! You're right in that we generally ignore the contents of the "keywords" meta tag. As with other possible meta tags, feel free to place it on your pages if you can use it for other purposes - it won't count against you.

Ah, sorry. I forgot to mention.
I was talking about Yahoo.

Interesting quote. I've read before that Google doesn't use the meta keywords tag but I got the impression maybe they still punished sites for attempting to throw the results. Guess not.

Must be something else....

Do not repeat keywords more than twice. Use phrases and different versions, turn phrases around, never use twice the word in a row even when coma divided.

- Wrong: real estate,realestate,estate real,real-estate

- Right:  real estate,property,estate real, properties realestate,realty,real-estate,property sale,real estate sale,

As you see i can use real estate far more than two times without actually repeating the keyword.

Even though Google doesn't seem to care about keyword tags anymore, there are still enough other search engines that do care.

I've read just don't over-do it. Keep your keywords to a handful at most and make sure if you have it in your META=keywords tag make sure it's in the content of your page.

It's just like real life - Too much is not good anywhere;  but than again, aren't we human?

I can still find high ranked and positioned websites with keyword tags from here to Mexico and back. Not much punishment here because bots just stop reading after the number of characters are reached. After all it's just a bot and it doesn't have an opinion.

And seriously; who would willingly add a keyword to the meta tags that isn't in the text of the content?

And then comes the tricky question; if than there would be an influence or even punishment, for having keywords in meta tags that are not to be found in the content text, all full flash websites (home pages) would drop out of the listings in a blink.

That just to be considered.

And seriously; who would willingly add a keyword to the meta tags that isn't in the text of the content?

Hey, I remember back in the day we where told to stuff as many words related to your website into the keywords tag.
That's probably why Google started ignoring them.

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Hey, I remember back in the day we where told to stuff as many words related to your website into the keywords tag.
That's probably why Google started ignoring them.

That's right. In fact - if I remember well - altavista was the first that had major problems with keyword stuffing, and I think that gave the opportunity to google to become the #1 search engine in the world.

Yeah and Elvis is sure dead by now! Are we having a history lesson here now? I'm all ears

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LOL

The biggest things I've found useful for my search engine optimization for JEMDiary was:
1) create intelligent meta keywords (for example, I say "Username wrote an entry titled *title* which begins *excerpt*)
2) Make sure your keywords -make sense - and are in your title - mine is 'Free Online Diary | Jemdiary'
3) h1 is more important than h2, etc...  and just cuz its an H1 doesn't mean it has to be gigantic - but don't overdo it.
4) for google, make sure to have a constant phrase if you want it to be weighted higher for an excerpt

Just my thoughts after experimentation.

This is way cool!  Not that I want to seem insensitive to your misery, CFarrow, but I still recall when Yahoo quietly announced that webmasters should include a keywords meta tag.  To the best of all of our knowledge, no major search engine even reads the keyword meta tag anymore, but Yahoo turned around and recommended it.

What gives?

I remember saying to myself, and I think I even posted a comment here or on another forum, that the only thing Yahoo will do with the keyword meta tag is use it as part of its red-flag algorithm.  So if you pass some kind of threshold in the keyword meta tag and in certain other areas, a red flag goes up and the trust value of the site goes down or it triggers a human review or something like that.

One case is hardly proof of course, but...I knew it!

Do not repeat keywords more than twice. Use phrases and different versions, turn phrases around, never use twice the word in a row even when coma divided.

- Wrong: real estate,realestate,estate real,real-estate

- Right:  real estate,property,estate real, properties realestate,realty,real-estate,property sale,real estate sale,

As you see i can use real estate far more than two times without actually repeating the keyword.

Even though Google doesn't seem to care about keyword tags anymore, there are still enough other search engines that do care.

Our websites include the same keyword maybe 20 times and we have never been penalized. We use Geo-targeting so we use our location in every keyword phrase. We have never experienced any problems. Our pages are all over the first pages of all the search engines. So our experience is that it doesn't matter along as the keywords are relevant to your website.

Since Google is known to mostly ignore this tag it isn't a problem and they others don't seem to mind. Note, however that Yahoo does still use this tag, but they have never penalized our sites.

Call it lucky! - But as you sure know, luck can run out. I've read somewhere, sorry i don't recall exactly where, that yahoo is planing or already implementing the meta keyword tag in their results - but only to determine spammers.
hmm... I wouldn't recommend to stuff the keyword tag with 20 times the same keyword. It's just not good seo and can get you punished at any time. If it works for you fine.

Call it lucky! - But as you sure know, luck can run out. I've read somewhere, sorry i don't recall exactly where, that yahoo is planing or already implementing the meta keyword tag in their results - but only to determine spammers.
hmm... I wouldn't recommend to stuff the keyword tag with 20 times the same keyword. It's just not good seo and can get you punished at any time. If it works for you fine.

Call it lucky! - But as you sure know, luck can run out. I've read somewhere, sorry i don't recall exactly where, that yahoo is planing or already implementing the meta keyword tag in their results - but only to determine spammers.
hmm... I wouldn't recommend to stuff the keyword tag with 20 times the same keyword. It's just not good seo and can get you punished at any time. If it works for you fine.

There isn't any luck involved and no stuffing. We only use keywords phrases that appear on our pages. We have used this method successfully on dozens of websites and Yahoo has not had a problem. All of our sites do equally well with all search engines.



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