Keyword Fluffing vs. Keyword Stuffing: Who’s In, Who’s Out?

27 December 2008 - By Ahson Rafiq - Filled in SEO


What is Black Hat SEO?

This article is about Black Hat SEO, there are more articles and techniques within this category. View all Black Hat SEO articles.

SEO techniques have grown and expanded so rapidly they all claim to provide fast and efficient results in one’s site. Site owners and web developers have also grown more ecstatic in generating more traffic into their web pages, as this entails more money into their pockets. But we all know that these tricks come and go, and while one becomes ineffective another is born to provide fantastic results. However, we must keep in mind that it’s actually the basic lessons that keep us alive in the business, and we should not underestimate their powers. In this article, we will talk about the power of keywords.

Keyword Fluffing

We have all heard about the different uses of keywords in boosting a particular website’s page ranking. Keywords are used by search engines to direct users to the pages that they have been looking for, while audiences use keywords in order to conduct a certain search. Most of all, site developers use keywords to enhance the popularity of the page they are taking care of, and at the same time come up with some relevance towards the site’s chosen niche.

However, the abuse of keywords became popular amongst a lot of web developers it became a black hat technique. We call this method keyword stuffing, the art of adding a lot of keywords on the content to the point that it already looks spammy. Search engines despise this so much and they have come up with rules towards keywords density. But there is one more technique that involves the use of keywords, and this is called keyword fluffing.

The main goal of keyword fluffing is to tag a site’s individual pages with targeted long tailed phrases. You can do this by generating a search box filled with static results containing an inner link within the right pages. In this case, a search query will produce triple to quadruple long-tailed search traffic. While this is not a common method, a lot of SEO experts use keyword fluffing on the sites they maintain.

How to conduct keyword fluffing

The process of keyword fluffing begins by creating a search box feature on your site. You can do this by using Mod-Rewrite, as this program prints every search result in a separate subdirectory. An example of this would be:

Keyword used: “cat food”
Static page result: www.example.com/search/catfood.html

Next, get some five relevant keywords to fluff your site’s niche. These keywords would have to be the most common words people use in doing search queries so that they would be able to stumble upon your site. You can play with the keywords so that all possible keywords and keyword phrases they will use can be tacked on your site.

The third step you must do is add a small “div” which says “related searches” or the like, and place it at the bottom of each individual page of your site. Then add a link to the search results for the long tailed phrases. An example would be:

Keyword: Cat food
Link: www.example.com/search/catfood.html
Anchor text: Friskies cat food

Among the things you must remember is that the links you will insert should be crawlable by engine spiders and pass the page rankings. You would prefer to have them crawled so that they will be indexed and begin to rank for the individual terms.

The value of “Recent Searches.” To boost more power to your site, you should make sure that the search box of your site has recorded all the most recent search queries. Remove the unnecessary html tags and unimportant words. You can’t afford your users abuse this feature otherwise you will be the one to suffer. Rather, focus on the the ways and means you can make more money from the targeted phrases you can find in the indexes.

The trick behind this method is to play with your site’s present indexing power. It’s always a must not to overdo things or else your work may end up in peril. Thus, you should take all necessary precautions, beginning with waiting until your site has achieved 60% saturation from the search engines.

Among the popular sites that have used this technique is YouTube.com. Well, the developers of the site have already announced that they have already stopped using this method, mainly because it goes against Google’s TOS and as well as it was becoming “unfair to the integrity of their results.” See, keyword fluffing is effective, as it help brought one of the most popular sites into where they are today. Because of this technique, other competitive sites were not able to match YouTube’s domain over the net.

The good thing about keyword fluffing is that you can play with all the keywords based on how your target audiences use them. In a way you also help your audiences know exactly what they want by providing the exact ways they write or say their thoughts and calculations.



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