What is keyword stuffing? Why do businesses need to avoid doing this?

Author: Ryan Walsh

10-minute read

Published on: 17/06/2025

 

Tell me, what is keyword stuffing?

It’s an old, outdated SEO tactic that should not be used. In a nutshell, all keyword stuffing is unnaturally placing keywords into sentences in an attempt to fool Google and the other search engines into ranking that page higher for that term. This method of optimisation doesn’t work.

It can lead to incurring a Google penalty, so keyword stuffing must be avoided.

You may wonder why, in 2025, one of the leading SEO businesses in Wales is even talking about keyword stuffing?

As it’s such old SEO tactic, that you would think that no business under the sun uses this tactic anymore?

However, the reason we wanted to write such a comprehensive article on this subject is straightforward.

The reason is that many businesses, especially start-up companies, attempt to implement SEO themselves.

Therefore, before an excellent SEO agency can get their mitts on optimising the website, sometimes the business has ruined its search engine optimisation straightaway (by incurring Google penalties).

Therefore, it’s a bit like taking a high-powered car out for a spin, crashing into a wall, then handing it back to the company to say, sort it out.

It’s much better to implement SEO the right way from the start. This article will, therefore, concentrate on explaining why keyword stuffing is something that your business should most definitely avoid.

 

Which areas of a website can be keyword-stuffed?

Titles and meta descriptions

 

Often, a lot of businesses read that the page title and the H1 title are the most critical aspects of on-page SEO.

 

This is very much true.

However, what then happens is that businesses go completely overboard in optimising the page titles, trying to cram in keywords that they want to rank higher for on Google. This is keyword stuffing and should be avoided.

When we have a chat with clients, we always advise them that the content marketing and on-page SEO should be written in a way that feels as if you’re talking to a friend about something.

Therefore, if you were having a chat with a friend and you were advising them on something, you wouldn’t keep mentioning the same words or phrases in the sentences repeatedly.

This is unnatural; what will happen is that Google’s complex algorithms will detect that a word or phrase is being unnaturally written into the sentence.

This can trigger a Google penalty.

That penalty can mean two things: one, the business drops down Google’s organic ranks substantially, and two, it could even mean, in severe cases, that the company is de-indexed.

 

 

What this means is that Google only wants high-quality, first-class content marketing that’s the best of the best in its index. Therefore, a business must offer high-quality advice, and any attempt to trick or deceive Google’s algorithm, such as using keyword stuffing methods to try to improve the page’s ranking, will trigger a Google algorithm penalty.

 

URL slug (don’t overoptimise the URL extensions)

Changing the URL slug is not advised if you have your company website live for an extended period.

The reason is that a page, such as the homepage, can accrue authority and SEO goodwill if it remains live for an extended period.

However, if you change URL extensions or slugs, as some web designers call them, what you are doing is creating a new page. One that Google will not have indexed before; therefore, the page has no SEO goodwill.

This means that the page will be treated as brand-new, and therefore have no page authority.
So, don’t go changing your URL slugs all of a sudden, because this can cause a drop in your business’s organic rankings.

However, when you are first setting up your website and designing it, you have an excellent opportunity to improve the on-page search engine optimisation. This means that you can provide gentle prompts to Google and the other search engines about what the page is about.

Notice that we use the wording “gentle prompts.” If the page sells Nike running trainers, you may want to use the URL slug /nike-running-trainers on your primary domain name.

As you retail that particular item, you are helping Googlebot to understand that page when it is crawling and indexing the page.

However, what you don’t want to do is go overboard, cramming every related keyword you can think of over and over again into the URL slug.

This could cause the URL slug to then be as long as your arm in terms of all the keywords that have been written into it. This will lead to an over-optimisation issue and will be deemed as keyword stuffing.

Anchor text

Anchor text is simply the text that you click on to click on a link and be teleported to another website.
However, in the past, this was an ancient SEO tactic; businesses would cram keywords into the anchor text to try and get the business to rank higher in Google’s SERP’s.

This would be an attempt to improve the business ranking again by writing keywords directly into the link text repeatedly.. This is most likely to trigger a Google Panda or Google Penguin penalty, which should be avoided.

 

Alt text

In our experience, as one of Wales highly experienced digital marketing agencies, we dont often see the alt text over-optimised. However, some businesses do try to keyword stuff the alt text as well, which again, is not a good idea when trying to improve your business’s organic SEO.

Don’t implement poor quality content marketing.

Google has made it abundantly clear through significant Google core updates, such as the Google Helpful Content Update and the Google E-

EAT updates, that high-quality content marketing is crucial to a business’s SEO success.

 

Therefore, one of the ways that Google will deem the content marketing as very low quality is if you use keyword stuffing.

It’s a sure-fire way of damaging the business’s search engine optimisation. Therefore, as soon as Googlebot crawls and indexes the work, Google’s algorithm will immediately recognise that the work is of low quality, contains spam, and has been keyword-stuffed.

 

High quality, Google E-EAT

Google rewards businesses that put in the hard work to improve their marketing. Therefore, content marketing, which has keyword stuffing, is going to be deemed as spam straightaway.

Instead, what you need is well-written content marketing that helps shoppers.
To help shoppers, the work must be both helpful and offer good quality advice.

Why would businesses use keyword stuffing?

Some businesses, including marketing companies that are not knowledgeable on best white hat methods to use, may employ misguided logic, suggesting that if they repeatedly write phrases like “organic dog food” in the text, the website will rank higher. This method doesn’t work; it’s usually implemented when the person doesn’t understand SEO that well.

For the real SEO experts out there, they will know that such methods are spammy and massively outdated. They could trigger a manual or algorithmic penalty, which means the website can move substantially down Google’s rankings. This is why spam and low-quality SEO should be avoided.

 

Read through your content marketing.

Proofreading is a good idea as it can help you pick up on spelling mistakes and help you improve your grammar.

However, by reading your business’s content marketing out loud, you can also look for whether you have written any sentences unnaturally.

What this means is that if you have keyword-stuffed the text, you may have done that deliberately; yet, you can pick up on this by proofreading the work and reading it out loud before you publish it.

If you detect that the sentences do not sound natural, that is you may keep repeating specific phrases or words too much, then ensure you change the wording.

Follow white hat on-page SEO best practices:

Do focus on creating content marketing for shoppers, not search engines

This is crucial: create content marketing, blog posts, product pages, and evergreen content to assist shoppers.

Therefore, you are not overly focused, or 100% focused, just on improving your search engine optimisation; instead, you should be focused on helping shoppers by offering high-quality information.

By doing so, the dwell time increases, and the bounce rate can be reduced, which can massively help improve a business’s search engine optimisation.

Dwell times and bounce rates can be monitored using Google Analytics.

 

Backlink anchor text

The anchor text that leads to your website needs to be carefully written as well.

Let’s say you operate a business in Cardiff.

Let’s say you have 100 backlinks that primarily lead to the homepage.

If all of these links have the same or similar anchor text, i.e., a keyword you want to rank for that’s written into the anchor text then this can be unnatural. It can be considered spammy.

Therefore, don’t use this SEO method; the anchor text must be naturally written.
By naturally written anchor text what we mean is the link should instead give very good indication of where the link is pointing, for example, if it’s directed towards a page selling say red car care wax, then label the anchor text to provide the shopper with a good understanding of where the link will take them.

 

About the author: Ryan Walsh

Ryan Walsh runs the well-known SEO agency “Walsh & Partners”.

For over 10 years, Ryan Walsh has been helping businesses to get on page one of Google.co.uk.

During that time, we helped our clients successfully navigate the numerous Google algorithm updates.

This means our agency, based in the heart of Cardiff, South Wales, is committed to implementing SEO the right way.

We only use the best white hat methods.

We are one of Cardiff’s leading SEO consultancies.

For a no-obligation quote, we are the company to call.