Bing Threatens Keyword Stuffers With Stiff Penalties
If you’re desperate to see one of your pages rank highly in search engine results for a certain keyword query, you might be tempted to squeeze that keyword into as many places as you can in the page’s content. Doing so could backfire spectacularly, according to a new report from Search Engine Land.
The report indicates that – without any official announcement on their blog – Bing has revised their Webmaster Guidelines, particularly the section warning site owners to avoid keyword stuffing. Adhere to the guideline or your page could plummet in ranking.
Keyword Stuffing Could Get You Delisted From Bing
Ideally, search engines would like to see the keywords on your page occurring naturally, where they make grammatical sense and don’t interrupt the flow of the content. The theory goes that as long as the content stays on topic, the targeted keyword and various associated keywords will occur naturally and in ample quantity for ranking purposes. Google has made it clear that stuffing in extra keywords will actually cause the page to drop in ranking, and now Bing is getting specific too.
In fact, Bing says plainly in its new guideline that keyword stuffing your page could cause that page to lose ranking or even be delisted from Bing’s search results pages entirely.
Specifically, Bing says that you should “create your content for real users and readers,” and that stuffing specific keywords into your page will result in a penalty if you’re doing it “with the sole intent of artificially inflating the probability of ranking for specific search terms.”
Professional content writers can create interesting content for your site that will rank well for the keyword phrase queries of your choosing without violating any of Google’s, Bing’s or Yahoo’s guidelines, including ones related to keyword stuffing.