Google John Mueller: Keyword Stuffing Should Not Warrant Removal From Index

Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that he doesn't believe things like keyword stuffing should lead a site or page to be removed from the Google search index. He said "IMO keyword stuffing shouldn't result in removal from the index."

This is after someone pointed out a page doing this technique and he said instead Google can just ignore the keyword stuffed words, like they are not there. He said "we can ignore boring keyword stuffing," which he added was "popular in the 90's; search engines have a lot of practice here."

Here is the example:

Hi @JohnMu and @dannysullivan, when does Google consider the keyword density as "keyword stuffing"?
This landing page ranks 9th for the keyword "Piani Cottura" and first for a synonymous ("Fornelli da incasso"). #seo pic.twitter.com/yZvaycV1Z3

— Merlinox (@merlinox) June 20, 2018

John responded:

It's usually more actionable to focus on your own sites, rather than to focus on "why is someone else's site ranking above mine when I don't think it's as good as mine" ... We use over 200 factors for ranking, the nice part is that you don't have to get them all perfect.

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) June 20, 2018

Yeah, but if we can ignore boring keyword stuffing (this was popular in the 90's; search engines have a lot of practice here), there's sometimes still enough value to be found elsewhere. I don't know the page, but IMO keyword stuffing shouldn't result in removal from the index.

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) June 20, 2018

John Mueller said this before, when we discussed their two pronged approach to spam - devalue the content or demote the page. He gave the exact example of keyword stuffing here saying in that video:

So for example, with keyword stuffing, if we can recognize that a page is doing keyword stuffing and we can just ignore the keyword stuff part and focus on rest, then that for us is also kind of a reasonable approach. Because we can't fix all pages. We can inform the webmasters and say hey you're doing this wrong, we can send them notifications from the web spam team but sometimes there are still useful information on those pages and we want to rank those pages for the useful part not for the kind of keyword stuffing bad part.

This isn't to mean Google likes keyword stuffing, it is against Google's guidelines plus Google has called out webmasters who have done it. Plus it is against Bing's guidelines as well.

Forum discussion at Twitter.