most people recommend no more than 9%, and that it should be written in such a way that it is still readable and makes sense.
for instance, try www.backlesslingerie.com. We are trying to optimize for 'panty lines' - you can see we've been a bit clever about the way we've done this.
and, sure enough, we quickly moved up the rankings for the words panty lines, from way down in 100th place to in top ten - it does work, but you've got to be certain you don't hurt the readability of the page in the process - I'd say our page is right on the borderline of being silly about it.
note the phraseology - 'on-line' 'visible panty lines of a different kind' 'Our patented womans lingerie line' - it was easy to get the right density of the word panty without seriously affecting readability, but not the word line, without being a bit resourceful.
John, that's fair enough, but, naturally, the top entries there are PR10 sites (like adobe and apple) - If you have a PR10 site keyword density hardly matters much.
If, however, you have a niche keyword, a niche site and you're trying to up your ratings, of course, either getting linked to with the anchor words you are after or making it obvious to the search engine what you are all about is pretty important.
What I'm trying to say is searching for a common common phrase like 'click here' is pretty much going to return a whose-who of sites.. searching for 'banalities of bananas' is going to tend to return sites that use that key phrase pretty regularly throughout their text, regardles of PR, as obviously it's a weird phrase and there isn't much competition for it.
In fact, currently, the top site for that phrase is a dictionary with PR4... Just for fun I'm now going to write an article about banal bananas on my site (utheguru.com). Let's revisit it in a few days, and I guarantee I'll be the top of the pops for that phrase.
You're right, it is a high-value site and it has more links pointing to it with that anchor text than most other sites combined.
There have been tests at finding the "optimal" keyword frequency with pages that are otherwise identical. The only problem is that these test are completly irrelevant for everything else on the web. You can only test your own keywords on your own pages.
Keyword frequency is not a major factor anymore, there are others that are much more important (just look at the simple content in h1-tags vs normal p's). Keyword usage is not dependant on the number of times that you use it but on many other things, including the natural frequency of the keywords in all the world's documents combined. You do not have access to that information, Google is getting close. Sometimes you do not even have to have a keyword on your page to get found, it is enough to put a "relative" of the word (or phrase) on your page, and if the phrase is rare enough, you could even rank #1 without a single anchor text with that phrase nor having that phrase on your page at all. There are some great documents about this online, but most of them are not that easy to read ... take a look at http://www.miislita.com/term-vector/term-vector-1.html for some more information, if you're interested.
Keyword frequency used to be a big factor, that's why there are so many tools and articles about it and all of that. It's not anymore. It's too easy to game. In fact, that's another part of the problem: it's too easy to recognize that you are trying to game with keyword frequency!
There is also a newness factor to consider, new pages of already indexed sites get a bump in the Serps, but will filter themselves back down and settle in to a lower spot, should be easy to watch in the banana experiment.
Ok - well - let's make this a good experiment then - we can use my bananas pages as a bit of a test case for our theories ;) God help me though if i start getting mad banana farmers getting angry at me.. :D
Oh, by the way, I do have another much higher PR site we could do this experiment with, but it sells things which I don't want bananas to become associated with :)
Hmmm... OK... this ain't good... I appear to have been completely booted from the index.. PLEASE tell me this is not Google's doing because of this post??
> Oh, by the way, I do have another much higher PR site we could do this > experiment with, but it sells things which I don't want bananas to > become associated with :)
Nah, actually, I looked at the logs, and you are right - I haven't even
been crawled yet. I've only been crawled by yahoo since last night - DO NO EVIL? I'm really hoping I haven't been booted for our little test post... that would be devastating.
This seems very bizzare to me... :(
Yeah I'll link a little and see what happens.. I'm not going to get overly stressed about this for another day or so..
What do you reckon of the new forum layout? I don't like the fact that popular posts aren't on the first page anymore?
Your site certainly did not get dumped because of the posting here. There have been many other sites posted here that would deserve a kick much more (see the infos on a popular Google penalty: http://www.threadwatch.org/node/11502 ;-) )... Don't worry too much about it, I think they're in the process of changing some things around, it would surprise me if it didn't involve a glitch or two (in terms of displayed data -- regardless of what is actually known) on the way there...
Yeah John - I think they need to reinclude the 'active posts' under the stickies... it just makes it too hard to stay interested in poking around if you can't have that kind of information at your fingertips - I love it when a post you haven't seen in a while, like Sussies post, pops up every now and again - helps keep things current!
> > What do you reckon of the new forum layout?not much :-)
> Your site certainly did not get dumped because of the posting here. > There have been many other sites posted here that would deserve a kick > much more (see the infos on a popular Google penalty:http://www.threadwatch.org/node/11502;-) )... Don't worry too much > about it, I think they're in the process of changing some things > around, it would surprise me if it didn't involve a glitch or two (in > terms of displayed data -- regardless of what is actually known) on the > way there...
> John
> > On Jan 24, 9:12 am, softplus wrote:
> > > LOL :-)
> > > Can you check your logs? I assume that Google hasn't even looked at the > > > new page...
> > > Should we link to your banana-test-page? Sneak a link in from your > > > high-value web-site.
> > > John- Hide quoted text -- Show quoted text -
Our algorithms want to see something that's a happy medium cleanly between: Extreme A: Not listing relevant terms at all on the page. Extreme B: Focusing on increasing keyword density to the point that your English/Writing teacher would thwap you with a wooden ruler. Hard. Repeatedly.
And I'll let you in on a little algo secret: There is no single magic number. People who say "The guaranteed optimal keyword density is [x]%" would ideally meet the same fate from an angry English teacher. Or Googler or Webmaster.
And lastly, let me respectfully (and pleadingly) reiterate one key point: The fact that you *can* find sites that rank well for a particular keyword engaging in "keyword stuffing" is NOT evidence that such keyword stuffing is an effective SEO tool. I can also show you many sites that use the letter "Q" exactly three times that also rank well. And no, this is not an indication of a secret "jump the 'q' rule."
If I want to add a post, such as this one that refers to the oft mysterious Q factor to my favorites in google-groups-the-empire-strikes-back how would I do that?
> Our algorithms want to see something that's a happy medium cleanly > between: > Extreme A: Not listing relevant terms at all on the page. > Extreme B: Focusing on increasing keyword density to the point that > your English/Writing teacher would thwap you with a wooden ruler. > Hard. Repeatedly.
> And I'll let you in on a little algo secret: There is no single magic > number. People who say "The guaranteed optimal keyword density is > [x]%" would ideally meet the same fate from an angry English teacher. > Or Googler or Webmaster.
> And lastly, let me respectfully (and pleadingly) reiterate one key > point: The fact that you *can* find sites that rank well for a > particular keyword engaging in "keyword stuffing" is NOT evidence that > such keyword stuffing is an effective SEO tool. I can also show you > many sites that use the letter "Q" exactly three times that also rank > well. And no, this is not an indication of a secret "jump the 'q' > rule."
> If I want to add a post, such as this one that refers to the oft > mysterious Q factor to my favorites in > google-groups-the-empire-strikes-back how would I do that?
> On Jan 23, 7:28 pm, Adam Lasnik wrote:
> > John's absolutely correct. "Write naturally."
> > Our algorithms want to see something that's a happy medium cleanly > > between: > > Extreme A: Not listing relevant terms at all on the page. > > Extreme B: Focusing on increasing keyword density to the point that > > your English/Writing teacher would thwap you with a wooden ruler. > > Hard. Repeatedly.
> > And I'll let you in on a little algo secret: There is no single magic > > number. People who say "The guaranteed optimal keyword density is > > [x]%" would ideally meet the same fate from an angry English teacher. > > Or Googler or Webmaster.
> > And lastly, let me respectfully (and pleadingly) reiterate one key > > point: The fact that you *can* find sites that rank well for a > > particular keyword engaging in "keyword stuffing" is NOT evidence that > > such keyword stuffing is an effective SEO tool. I can also show you > > many sites that use the letter "Q" exactly three times that also rank > > well. And no, this is not an indication of a secret "jump the 'q' > > rule."
Ok Adam - thanks for that clarification. Adam, I don't know if this is in any way linked to my post, above, but my blog, utheguru (www.utheguru.com) disappeared completely from the google index within a couple of hours of me adding the above 'experimental' post. Previously we had around 90% of our pages indexed, now none (although I see in the last few hours, a cached version of my front page has returned).
Is it possible, that for some reason, the above post has caused a penalty to be applied to my site, and if so, how would I go about rectifying it?
I and others think it's a long shot that I've been penalized for my banality of bananas post - but, if it is the case, please not I've included your reply in my blog, and this was never meant to be malicious - just an experiment.
> Our algorithms want to see something that's a happy medium cleanly > between: > Extreme A: Not listing relevant terms at all on the page. > Extreme B: Focusing on increasing keyword density to the point that > your English/Writing teacher would thwap you with a wooden ruler. > Hard. Repeatedly.
> And I'll let you in on a little algo secret: There is no single magic > number. People who say "The guaranteed optimal keyword density is > [x]%" would ideally meet the same fate from an angry English teacher. > Or Googler or Webmaster.
> And lastly, let me respectfully (and pleadingly) reiterate one key > point: The fact that you *can* find sites that rank well for a > particular keyword engaging in "keyword stuffing" is NOT evidence that > such keyword stuffing is an effective SEO tool. I can also show you > many sites that use the letter "Q" exactly three times that also rank > well. And no, this is not an indication of a secret "jump the 'q' > rule."
There are less threes and more 19's than yesterday if that's any help. So I'd say it isn't totally a banation, I can't imagine they'd have a cause to take action about a goofy post about the banality of bananas, the internet is full of goofy stuff.
> Ok Adam - thanks for that clarification. Adam, I don't know if this is > in any way linked to my post, above, but my blog, utheguru > (www.utheguru.com) disappeared completely from the google index within > a couple of hours of me adding the above 'experimental' post. > Previously we had around 90% of our pages indexed, now none (although I > see in the last few hours, a cached version of my front page has > returned).
> Is it possible, that for some reason, the above post has caused a > penalty to be applied to my site, and if so, how would I go about > rectifying it?
> I and others think it's a long shot that I've been penalized for my > banality of bananas post - but, if it is the case, please not I've > included your reply in my blog, and this was never meant to be > malicious - just an experiment.
> D
> On Jan 24, 11:28 am, Adam Lasnik wrote:
> > John's absolutely correct. "Write naturally."
> > Our algorithms want to see something that's a happy medium cleanly > > between: > > Extreme A: Not listing relevant terms at all on the page. > > Extreme B: Focusing on increasing keyword density to the point that > > your English/Writing teacher would thwap you with a wooden ruler. > > Hard. Repeatedly.
> > And I'll let you in on a little algo secret: There is no single magic > > number. People who say "The guaranteed optimal keyword density is > > [x]%" would ideally meet the same fate from an angry English teacher. > > Or Googler or Webmaster.
> > And lastly, let me respectfully (and pleadingly) reiterate one key > > point: The fact that you *can* find sites that rank well for a > > particular keyword engaging in "keyword stuffing" is NOT evidence that > > such keyword stuffing is an effective SEO tool. I can also show you > > many sites that use the letter "Q" exactly three times that also rank > > well. And no, this is not an indication of a secret "jump the 'q' > > rule."
