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Keyword Stuffing in Sidebar Categories? Density Too High?

by tomv
8 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Howdy folks,

I'm am very familiar with most of Google's standards, but I'm not sure exactly where they draw the line on keyword density in navigation or category links. 95% of SEO bloggers are dumb. Everyone's parroting each other and stating the obvious, so a Google search is turning up nothing.

I'm creating a blog about meditation. There will be guided meditations and more topical articles and videos. There will also be guided exercises that I don't necessarily consider meditations, like warm ups for instance. The best possible user experience (Google's claimed holy grail) is to repeat the word "meditation" in all categories for guided meditations, but I'm hearing horror stories about webmasters getting penalized.

E.g. I tentatively envision the navigation to include, but not be limited, the following categories:

Beginner Basics
Visual Meditation
Breath Meditation
Feeling Meditation
Sensory Meditation
Mantra Meditation
Chant
Nature Meditation
Movement Meditation
Warm Up Exercises
Qigong
Spirituality
Etc
Etc
Etc

Imagine me taking out the main keyword. Then we have a BAD user experience: Beginner Basics, Visual, Breath, Feeling, Sensory, etc. What kind of site user will appreciate that? From what I hear, Google could slap me for HELPING the user. I'm not trying to "SEO" the navigation. The user is king, and I don't want search engines thinking the opposite. Do you all have experience with this? I can't have any mistakes down the line. Thanks.
#categories #density #high #keyword #sidebar #stuffing
  • Profile picture of the author ElusiveEnd
    Listing categories, even if they all share a common keyword, won't get you penalized. And, as you mentioned, providing a good user experience is the key to most search engine success. If anything it is good for SEO to list your categories as it better links your site structure together.

    If worked on many sites where a category list is a high priority, and many include the same keywords, and I've never seen a negative effect on SEO.
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  • Profile picture of the author tomv
    Hmmm. So maybe it won't be such a problem unless it ends up like this page? hxxp://bettafishcare.com
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  • Profile picture of the author Cobaki
    If your intention is to give your users a better experience, I do not think that Google will have a problem with it. And besides, removing the main keyword can really make things sound odd. Maybe, you can try going easy on the keyword density. This depends upon the length of your web contents, too.
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  • Profile picture of the author dee4d
    The categories don't matter in KWD. What google penalizes on is mainly a keyword that is not related to the niche and that will appear as inappropriate. And this will not work well for your website too.

    This is among other techniques that may be employed that are not in line with best SEO practices. I believe you have done proper research on your categories. They are good, related to the main site, and will make you generate relevant content and / or products to your target audience.

    As long as you are doing the right thing, and your niche, categories and keyword setup is thorough and related - based on your research, you are good to go.

    Just don't have too many categories, consider narrowing down to around 5 or 6.
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  • Profile picture of the author tomv
    I'm mapping it out now. It's looking like 20 or so categories with 7-9 containing the word "meditation". I can probably get away with flat with no hierarchy. Visually, hierarchies make no difference anyway (parent and child categories). It just shows up flat and only changes what's on the category pages.
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    • Profile picture of the author niiche
      For seo purposes you can name the category slug with the single word but for use experience you can name the category anything you like so it is not necessary to keep repeating the word "meditation" the search engines will see figure out the relationship from your urls and or linking structure.
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  • Profile picture of the author hirithk
    Hi,
    Using the keywords in Footer, sidebar sometimes leads to more keyword stuffing, when the algorithm is updates all the keyword ranking will be dropped.Instead using these the content should be good enough to get raking.
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  • Profile picture of the author paramkumar
    Filling web page content with lots of similar keywords is called keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is one of the popular technique 3 to 4 years back to rank well in Google search engine result page.



    But now day's keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO technique. If you do keyword stuffing on your website then it may possible that your website will be filtered from search result.
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