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Keyword Stuffing

What it looks like on a real page

You can usually hear it before you can prove it. Read the page out loud and the same phrase keeps arriving where a normal word should be.

• The target phrase repeated in nearly every single sentence
• Long lists of city or state names dropped into the footer
• Text hidden behind an image, or set to the background color
• Image descriptions packed with search terms instead of what is in the picture
• Whole paragraphs that read like a phrase book rather than a person

Why it stopped working

Early search engines counted words, so people gave them plenty of words to count. That era ended a long time ago.

Search engines now work with meaning. They can tell a page is about plumbing without being told fourteen times, and repeating it adds nothing to their understanding.

Worse, it makes the page unreadable for humans. A visitor who cannot follow a sentence is not going to call you, whatever the search engine thought of it.

The same goes for an answer engine such as ChatGPT or Google's AI answers. Each one has to make sense of your page before it can use anything on it.

Stuffed text is difficult to make sense of, so it ends up helping nobody at either end of the search.

The tactic survives mostly because it is easy to do and hard to admit was a waste of an afternoon.

What to write instead

Answer the question the reader actually typed, in the first two lines, in plain words.

Use the phrase where a person would naturally use it. The heading, an early sentence, and perhaps once more later on. Then get on with being useful.

Add the detail only you can give. Your process, your service area, the job you refuse to take and the reason why.

That is what makes a page genuinely useful, and it is the one thing a competitor cannot copy from you.

How Microsite Generator handles this

The agent writes from your answers about your business, not from a phrase you want repeated. The words come out of the interview, so the page sounds like a page.

The compliance gate then does something unusual. The platform's page generator refuses pages that are a template with the town swapped, and edits that make pages too alike are refused too.

Pages that are individually built are checked against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards on the way through.

Updated September 2026