In an excellent thread recently at High Rankings Forum, Admin Randy points to some interesting revelations from Matt Cutts of Google.
Giving detailed references to the source material, Randy delivers more proof about the myth of keyword density ratios and a seemingly lowered sense of importance with regard to duplicate content. Here’s an excerpt from the thread.
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There’s a relatively brief summary of the October 2008 Webmaster Chat on Matt’s blog down in the comments. In fact, the summary is probably a good read for quick hitting points on lots of subjects.
In the above reference the quote is:
Keyword Density
Not really a factor. Yes keyword should be present but density is not important. Include the keyword but make writing sound natural.
The question comes up at absolutely every Webmaster Chat I’ve been able to attend in person or read transcripts of after the fact. Matt himself answered one such question in the June 2008 chat, which SEO Roundtable has an archive of if you’re interested.
In this one the quote is a bit more nebulous, with the details being:
Antony Johnson
Q: Hi Matt, Are there any guidelines available on keyword density we have pages that are about 1 single subject and the keyword density is quite high
Matt Cutts
A: Antony, you may not believe this, but we tend not to think much about KW density here at Google, b/c our algorithms handle it pretty well. My advice is to pull in an innocent/non-search friend and have them read the text. If they raise their eyebrow …
Then for more fun, Matt even has several posts about the subject of KWD on his blog. The one I always liked the best was this old one from 2006 where he states:
…in the on-page space, I’d recommend thinking more about words and variants (the “long-tail”) and thinking less about keyword density or repeating phrases.
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We’ve known for years that keyword density ratios are not an accurate measure of SEO copywriting success. Actually, we’ve also had a clue about the overreaction to the duplicate content issues, if you go by what shows up in the Google search results. They’ve been saying duplicate content would be filtered, but in a high percentage of cases, this simply isn’t the case.
What was it your parents used to tell you all the time? Do what I say and not what I do? That’s not always the best advice. Use your judgment. Don’t trust everything you read. Check it out for yourself to see if all the hype is really justified… even when it comes to what Google says. This is not the first case where I’ve seen them say one thing and do another. As with keyword density ratios and duplicate content, it might be like Chicken Little. The sky might not be falling after all.
