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Keyword and Keyphrase Abuse Guidelines
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Over the past (3) months, we’ve had to draw some lines in the sand due to the increased volume of article submissions that included high keyword/keyphrase repetition to full-out blatantly keyword abuse.
We’ve made mistakes by rejecting a few hundred articles that turned up as false positives for keyword abuse when in fact, the author wasn’t trying to hit any keyword density metrics. This went on for a (4) week period in the middle of December 07 through the middle of January 08 until we eased the restrictions to lower the rejection mistakes on our part.
FACT: 2,416 articles were not accepted in the last 30 days due to keyword/keyphrase abuse.
Worse, I can’t tell you specifically what our internal criteria is for when we’ll reject an article for keyword & keyphrase repetition vs. abuse because we need to be deliberately vague to prevent gaming of the system.
Here are some guidelines to help you AVOID having your article rejected for keyword and/or keyphrase abuse:
- Don’t make repetitive key phrases and keywords bold or italics.
- Don’t use software to assist yourself to meet keyword and key phrase density metrics.
- Don’t repeat key phrases more than once per sentence.
An example (changed to protect privacy) of a paragraph from an article we rejected for keyphrase abuse of the word “Massage Table”:
For the members who we rejected their article for keyword and/or keyphrase abuse when in fact you didn’t use any software or weren’t aiming for any keyword density score, I and we apologize.
If you’re one of the good members (the greater majority are good) and want to increase the chance of having your article accepted when you know you naturally write very keyword dense, here are some guidelines to consider:
- Aim to ensure your target keyphrase is not repeated more than once every 100 words.
- Example: Your article is 700 words and your keyphrase is “Yoga Mat” should not be repeated more than (7) times in the entire article body.
- Know that our sensitivity is less about natural keyword repetition and more about blatant keyphrase abuse.
You can expect in the coming weeks that we’re improving our reporting within your membership interface to help you know why specifically an article wasn’t able to be accepted for keyword repetition or abuse.
For now, if all of this sounds like noise to you… then ignore it all because you are most likely in the 99% who have not had an article rejected for keyword abuse. :-)
 Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 1, 2008 at 11:32 am | 3,039 views |
67 Comments »
Jan,
The 1 keyphrase per 100 articles is NOT A RULE.
It’s a guideline mainly created for those who abuse keywords and keyphrases.
We’d accept articles that have more than one keyphrase per 100 words if the article looked natural.
It’s when a keyphrase gets repeated 2 to 3 times per sentence or repeated excessively when compared to the total word count that it becomes an issue.
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Okay, I won’t tell you how much trouble I was having trying to decide what constituted a word. But I gotta tell ya, I was sweating it!!! (My latest area of expertise is ocean front property in Arizona – if you’re interested, I have several acreas to sell.)
Now… is it five letters, or is it a real word? Do two letter words count??? What about kangaroo, does that count as one word or two?
I think I better get off of here before Chris bans me for stirring up the pot!!! LOL
Jan
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Christopher:
On another note – I’ve been having my articles routinely re-categorized into areas that have nothing to do with what I write about. I’m a horse racing handicapper and author yet my articles get routinely placed into Casino-Gambling. As you may know, that is blackjack, roulette and the like.
I don’t know why this keeps happening (again, every single one of my articles are purely about horse racing.)
I love the site. I love the service. But that is driving me crazy.
Thanks for listening – Denny
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Denny,
I show all 11 of your articles are in the Horse Racing category:
http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Denny_Nash&o=&ecat=Recreation-and-Sports:Horse-Racing
I can see why our editors might have been confused because your domain has the words BET and WIN in it… I’ve added a note to your membership file about this issue and hope that clears it up for future articles.
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Hi All,
Well I read that MASSAGE TABLE example and it was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen. Who would want to read junk like that?
I mean, I can understand that some people want to rank higher for keywords but really, it’s pretty unintelligent if you think a REAL person is gonna put up with reading the same words over and over again. Or over and over again. Or over and… well, you probably get the idea.
Write for people not machines.
Regards
Gary
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Hi Chris,
I just submitted an article and listed three key words:
Credit, Credit Repair, Credit Score
I understand about the body of the article but would this be considered abuse since I used the word ‘credit’ in all three keyword terms?
Thanks,
Brian
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Brian,
That’s not keyword abuse.
Using the word “CREDIT” 29 times in a 722 word article might be considered excessive, especially if it destroys the readability of your sentence structure.
(6) uses of the keyphrase “CREDIT SCORE” in a 722 word article is NOT abuse. You’ve followed the 1 or fewer keyphrase per 100 words abuse guideline.
Another litmus test to use is this: Did I over-use a keyword in any single sentence? ie: Did I use the word “Credit” 3-5 times in a single sentence? That would be abuse. In your case it doesn’t appear to be too repetitive.
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Hey, Chris,
I feel alone in the dark in this thread.
There’s so much concern about keyword density, percentage of keywords in headers and other forms of SEO arcania.
First, no one knows for certain what Google’s latest algo is looking for. They change the darn thing hourly.
Second, stated in a previous post, the significance of SEO, and therefore keyword density, have diminished considerably in this age of RSS, syndicated content, directories, blogs and other access routes to a site.
I’ve been spending a lot less time worrying about keywords and more time trying to build connectivity within my site’s topical neighborhood.
Site visitors find my site and services through syndicated content, hosted content, guest blogging and other SEM tactics.
SEO is dead as a useful means of growing a site to success.
Just one man’s opinion.
Paul Lalley
webwordslinger.com
editor.wordsinc@gmail.com
Thanks for your time.
PL
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I’ve just read the comments posted by Paul Lalley re SEO being dead. By coincidence I am current working on an article about the diminishing importance of SEO as a marketing strategy. According to my research to date, Paul is definitely not alone in his opinion that SEO is much less important now that it has been.
Many others have expressed those exact feelings. Everything I’ve read suggests very strongly that Google is doing all it can to discourage key word stuffing or any tactic which is intended to artificially improve Page Rank.
It is important to note that Google, while being on top of the heap now, has to operate in a very competitive environment. New search engine technologies are being developed all the time which could challenge Google’s dominance.
By creating new rules Google has recognized that uses want results which truly represent the search terms they have entered. Their new rules designed to help ensure that their SERP will provide contextually relevant content. This is exactly what Google’s competitors are trying to do as well.
Irrespective of who wins the Search Engine Wars, all of us who write articles will have to play by their rules and it’s pretty much guaranteed that those rules will continue to change and to survive we must do so as well.
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I’ve had a couple of articles sent back to me where I’ve encountered difficulty trying to divine exactly which word was “abused.” When I just changed some nouns to pronouns the articles were accepted. I’m not making any effort at all to use SEO or keyword density. I have listed some terms that identify the article I’ve sent in so any reader could know if it’s something they’re interested in–was that a mistake? Should I just leave keywords blank? For those of us who don’t know which keyword is repeated too much, aside from using the pronoun “it” a lot, do you have any suggestions how to avoid tripping into the keyword counter trap? The changes I’ve made to get past keyword counting haven’t improved readability. The articles are still readable, but they were better before I had to tinker with them and I was just writing “in the flow.” Thanks for your help.
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Robert,
Conjunctions or what I call “junk words” are not included in any of our calculations.
The new tool we introduced earlier this week:
http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2008/02/help-for-accidental-keyphrase-abuse.html
…Is designed to take the guess-work out of helping you know which keyphrase or keyword our editor thought was repeated too much.
Keyword abuse is a much small issue vs. Keyphrase repetition. The greater majority of our issue is with keyphrases being over-used to the point where it becomes unnatural.
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I’m in the same boat as Robert. I don’t intentionally abuse keywords. I do as he says: I write “in the flow” too.
When I have an article accepted and then it gets taken down for a “problem,” after a week of strong views, most of the time I have no idea which part is the “offending” part and I just have to guess and re-submit. So, in effect, I am “de-sensitising” in the dark, hoping that what I am doing will make the article good.
I just got pinged for a “bloat.” I thought it maybe three words in my title being bolded at the end of the article, so I unbolded (is that a word?) them.
Did the article get isolated because somebody reported it or did it trip a meter because it got too many views in too short a time? I just don’t understand how it can get approved and then after a week it can get disapproved.
Maybe I’ll have to purchase one of those massage tables to massage my articles into shape in future. I dunno. I’m just being frivolous now because I don’t use any software to get the keyword thing 0.01% under the maximum allowed “abuse.” I just write naturally.
I totally agree that the massage table commentary above is utterly ridiculous. Articles like that are the same as verbal stuttering but done deliberately and they are nonsense.
Gary
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Kathleen,
You were one of the ~200 wrongly rejected for kw repetition.Your article has been accepted:
http://ezinearticles.com/?id=931576
UPDATED: 2 minutes after I posted the comment: Upon further review, you repeated “Fair Trade Town” 15 times in the article body on a small 428 word article. That’s excessive. Now I am the one who messed up accepting it. I’m going to leave it accepted, but in the future: We’d ask you to not repeat any key phrase more than once per 100 words.
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