Keyword Density Rejection Case Study
Keyword Density and Keyphrase Density in articles is a topic we don’t like discussing because we’d prefer that our members remain blissfully unaware of what all this nonsense is. The temptation to optimize your articles for some numeric keyword density metric would (in our opinion) produce a less authentic, less valuable, and less reader-centric article.
Occasionally a member will produce an article that has excessive keywords that we reject and the member will feel it’s way unfair because they weren’t aiming for any keyword density metric. Our position is that math trumps human review in these cases, meaning that we’ve had to put a hard floor on what we’ll accept numerically.
The actual numeric floor that is public is to not exceed 1% keyword density. That means you should not repeat a keyword or keyphrase more than once per 100 words. There is a gray area where we’ll accept up to double that (2%) if other variables are met (high quality unique article by an author with a clean history of submitting high value content over time).
EzineArticles expert author Steve Weber has given us permission to use one of his unpublished articles as a case study. Below you will see the internal tool that we use to see what the human eye might not see when reviewing content for this issue:
How Important is Google Page Rank Anyway?
Many people misunderstand the issue of Google Page Rank. For those who don’t know, it is a ranking Google gives to every individual page it indexes. It varies page to page; your home page may have a PR of 4, but a secondary page may have a PR of 2…or even visa versa sometimes.
You can see the page rank of every page you visit by installing the Google Toolbar. After installing it, you must manually enable the Page Rank feature in the bar. Be aware that the toolbar is only updated by Google every 3 or 4 months. Therefore, the PR displayed may not be the same PR Google actually has given your site at any given time.
PR for a given page is based upon how many backlinks there are to that page. Additionally, the quality of those backlinks plays a significant role in the rankings. Even a site’s own internal linking has a positive effect on PR. In most cases a dozen or so directory type backlinks, along with a good internal linking strategy between a site’s own pages will eventually result in a PR of 1 or 2.
All things being equal, a higher PR is better than a lower PR. However, a page with a higher PR will not necessarily insure it ranks higher in a Google search than a page with lower PR. In fact, it happens all the time that a low PR page will outrank a higher PR page for a given keyword.
How can this happen? It’s all about relevance. If a page is optimized better for a given keyword, then chances are it will rank higher than a page which is not optimized as well even if the poorly optimized page has higher PR. This can be especially true when long tail keywords are concerned. Again, it’s all about how relevant a given page is for a given keyword…according to Google. Page Rank is only one factor in the search result rankings.
A side note about PR:
The rankings are based on an algorithmic scale. Take for example a page which has a PR of 3. Moving that page to a PR of 4 means increasing the page‘s “link juice” by a factor of 10. Each singular increase in PR represents a ten fold increase in back link quality and/or quantity. This factor is why it is very difficult and rare for pages to ever obtain PR‘s of 7 and higher.
The moral of the Page Rank story is not to worry a lot about it. Long tail keywords are most important for smaller/newer sites. PR only plays a small role in determining the success of a well optimized niche site.
Article Stats:
- Body Word Count: 452 words
- High Density Keywords:
- page occurs 24 times (5.3%)
- pr occurs 19 times (4.2%)
I can see why Steve is frustrated with us for not accepting this article because I believe he was honestly not aiming for a keyword or keyphrase density metric even if he is an SEO expert and has full knowledge of what keyword density as a concept is.
Essentially his article exceeds our external published guidelines by 4-5 times and our internal “not-so public until now” guidelines by a little more than double the metric allowed.
At this time, his unpublished article above is a casualty of our system designed to prevent keyword abuse.
Side Note: We only compute this metric on the article body, but if the keywords and keyphrases that exceed our guidelines are also used in the Article Title and Resource Box (They ALWAYS are in articles that are correctly rejected) this may count against your article to get accepted if it’s on the edge of acceptance or rejection.
Suggestion: Be keyword intelligent in your Article TITLE, and forget about doing any keyword density metric in the article body.
I’d like to know your thoughts on this issue?
Dear annoyed person,
You’ve got your facts not quite right.
It’s a 2% KEYPHRASE limit, not 2% keyword limit. A keyphrase is 2 or more words.
Our KEYWORD density limits are currently 4-6%.
We determined that most SEO spammers target keyphrase abuse primarily and therefore we are tighter on keyphrase abuse than we are on single keyword abuse.
February 25, 2010 at 11:01 AM[Reply]