Back in the days when fooling search engines was a lot easier than it is now, keyword stuffing became common practice in an attempt to achieve higher search engine rankings. It was pretty simple to hide a slew of chosen keywords and phrases within the text or tags of a page that visitors would never actually see, but search engines would.

It was considered unethical and blackhat but in the days when Alta Vista was a major search engine it worked so lots of people did it. The end result of course was not really helpful to anyone and led to the far smarter search engine algorithms that we see today.

Keyword stuffing is an outdated and pretty pointless tactic these days and Google for example will often de-index any pages found using such transparent attempts to skew their rankings.

Photo Credit : S Yume

The idea however still hasn't completely left us and you will still find people using huge numbers of keywords in meta tags, even though very few, if any, search engines even take any notice of the keyword meta tag these days.

So,although keyword stuffing a web page is a completely pointless and probably counter productive thing to do the idea behind it took on a new lease of life with the explosion of things like article marketing and blogging.

It is not uncommon to see people advocating the idea even in 2009, and it bugs the heck out of web users. I've noticed some particularly harsh comments here on Hubpages where a lot of people consider that writing is an art to be enjoyed by humans as opposed to robots and should not be compromised to please anyone or anything but the human eye.

Whilst I agree to a certain extent, the importance of proper use of keywords has to be considered for certain fields of endeavor online.

However, when it comes to writing articles or hubs, even if they are promotional or commercial in nature, repetition upon repetition is not likely to achieve anything beyond a hasty exit from your overly aggressive keyword use.

I found a good example of a hub that has been completely and blatantly written in an attempt to get a high ranking in Google and it exhibits quite nicely how an article stuffed with keywords reads so poorly for a human visitor.

The hub is actually listed in Google's search results, on the second page for the term the writer has tried so hard to rank for. It is rather silly for a number of reasons.

Hubpages will often rank well in the SERPS without the need for this silliness. I am actually quite surprised that this one has done as well as it has in Google considering the rather obvious overuse of keywords and phrases. A well thought out title and a much less shotgun approach would have probably seen better results.

The other thing is that it targets an SEO product, so the target audience are going to have an interest in, and probably some knowledge of, keywords. When they land on this page, they are faced with someone who demonstrates a distinct lack of knowledge and poor execution of his SEO "craft".

Will they buy the product through an affiliate link on that page? Maybe. However, I think such an obvious misuse of keyword techniques would put many off, whereas a more compelling and well written review would have seen far better results.

I edit a free general article directory and the shocking fact is that I probably reject or delete around 90% of submissions nowadays due to appalling standards of writing, keyword stuffing, and just plain spam. It has become so bad that although the site generates a reasonable amount of income it is reaching the point where I'm wondering if it is remotely worth the effort.

In summary, keywords are grossly misused online and like anything else that garners such a poor reputation for itself, also becomes misunderstood and reviled. Those who use them sensibly often feel justifiably aggrieved when mentioning the subject raises so many hackles.

Everything in moderation as my old family doctor used to say.