Keyword Stuffing Left Over From an Old Site

A paragraph written for a machine

Read the services page on many websites built around 2011 and you find paragraphs like this: our carpet cleaning company offers carpet cleaning in Surrey, with expert Surrey carpet cleaning from the best carpet cleaners in Surrey.

Beneath it, in small print, sits a list of forty towns and neighbourhoods, some of them an hour's drive away.

It was written on advice that was common at the time: repeat the phrase, name every town, and search engines will reward you.

That advice is long out of date. The pages are still there, read every day by people deciding whether to call.

Where it hides

• Repeated phrases, the service and a town name, in every sentence.
• Town lists at the bottom of pages or across the footer.
• City pages, one per suburb, identical apart from the name.
• Hidden text, such as words coloured to match the background.
• Stuffed alt text on images, listing keywords instead of describing.
• A keywords tag in the code, listing dozens of phrases.

The third is the most common, and the most work to undo. Twenty suburb pages, each a copy with one word changed, look to a search engine like one page trying to occupy twenty searches.

What changed in search

Google's own webmaster guidelines describe this as keyword stuffing, and give blocks of text listing the cities a page is trying to rank for as an example.

Repetition stopped helping years ago. Google has spent a long time learning to recognise related words and phrasings, so a page does not need to repeat an exact phrase to be found for it.

Near-identical city pages fall under what the guidelines call doorway pages, and Google has ignored the keywords tag in the code for about a decade.

At best, the stuffing does nothing. At worst, it marks the page as one written for search engines rather than for people.

What it costs with people

The bigger cost is with the person reading.

Somebody comparing three carpet cleaners on a phone wants to know what you do, what it costs, how long the carpet takes to dry, and whether you will turn up. A stuffed paragraph answers none of it.

It also sounds odd. Text that repeats a phrase five times reads like a directory or a spam page, and readers judge a business by the way it writes.

A town list does its own damage: a customer in one of the places named cannot tell whether you really work there, or merely typed it.

Keep the words people actually search

The fix is not to strip out every search term. The words people use to find you belong on the page; they just need to appear the way a person would write them.

Search Console's performance report shows the searches that already bring your site into the results. Those are the terms to keep, and they are often not the ones the old page was stuffed with.

Your phone calls are the other source. Customers say area rug, pet stains, upholstery, or a smell that will not go away, and those words belong in your headings.

Use the main term where it naturally falls: the page title, the main heading and the opening sentence.

Saying where you work

The town list can become one sentence a person would write, something like: we clean carpets across Surrey, Langley, White Rock and North Delta, and travel further for larger jobs.

Name places where they are true and useful. A project description mentioning the neighbourhood it was in tells a reader more than any list, and it is local detail a search engine can actually use.

The service area set on your Google My Business listing does the same job on the map, without a word of stuffing.

A worked example

A three-van carpet cleaning company had a site built in 2011, with a page for each service and twenty-two suburb pages, each a copy of the home page with the town name changed.

Every service page repeated carpet cleaning and a town name in almost every sentence, and the footer listed forty places.

A caller asked, politely, whether the company was a franchise or a call centre, because the site read like a directory rather than a local business.

The rewrite gave each service a page written for a person: what the job involves, drying time, pets and stains, and price ranges.

The suburb pages were merged into one service-area page, with permanent redirects from the old addresses. The terms Search Console showed bringing visitors stayed in titles and headings, and the main towns appeared once each, in a sentence.

City pages worth keeping

A page for a particular town earns its place only when it says something that applies to that town: jobs done there, travel charges, a crew based nearby, photographs of local work.

Pages that differ only by name are better merged into one service-area page.

Each old address should then redirect permanently to the new page, so bookmarks, old links and search results land somewhere useful rather than on an error.

Titles and descriptions

The page title, shown as the headline in search results, is often the most stuffed line on an old site: carpet cleaning Surrey, carpet cleaners Surrey BC, best carpet cleaning.

One clear title reads better: the service, the place and the business name, like a label.

The meta description, the short summary beneath it, should be a sentence somebody would want to click, not a second list of phrases.

The counter-case

Some repetition is simply natural.

A page about carpet cleaning will say carpet cleaning several times, because that is what it is about. A business that serves eight towns can list them, once, in a sentence.

And a page that already brings in steady enquiries deserves care rather than a fresh start. Keep its address and the search terms in its title, change the body, and watch Search Console for a few months afterwards.

Write for the person deciding whether to call, and keep the words they use.

The rewrite, in order

1. List the pages with repeated phrases or town lists.
2. Check Search Console for the terms that bring visitors.
3. Rewrite each page for a person deciding to call.
4. Use the main term in the title and heading.
5. Replace the town list with one plain sentence.
6. Merge identical city pages and redirect the old addresses.
7. Read every page aloud before publishing.

Step two is what makes the rewrite safe. It shows which words are already earning their place, so the new page keeps them and drops only the repetition around them.

Structuring the rewritten pages is covered in writing pages in blocks.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.