In a discussion with Ted, he felt that there was no limit on keyword density and the tools that were restricting keyword density to arbitrary values like less than 2.5%, were doing the industry a disservice. So we test out if there is indeed a too much in keyword density and if there is an optimum level to it that would stand out.
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Transcription Below
This test was done by Ryan Hough. If you are in the Skype group and you have been following some trends currently in SEO, there is the idea that maybe you can’t overoptimize in terms of keyword density. Perhaps that is going away or there are instances where you can really throw in as many keywords on a page as you like.
The concept here was to run multiple pages and just have varied keyword density. We are just putting the keywords in text, is that we are looking at here with the idea that maybe more is better at the moment and in that case, we would anticipate the largest amount to index first and kind of index in descending order if that is the case.
Or they could do the other way and the people that kind of give weird advice that your keyword density needs to be 2% as mentioned in this write up is on to something, that seems to me as the most unlikely outcome but it was exciting to see if maybe the pages would actually go into an order according to their density.
I won’t leave you in suspense, if you look at this test, what Ryan did was that the put the specific density in the url so you can see. The pages were launched and in this first set, the page with 10% was the initial winner, 5%, 2.5%, 17.5%, 20%, you can see that it is scattered and all over the place.
A little while later, the 10 was still on top, then the 2.5 dropped all the way to the bottom and this is leaning to maybe they are sorting themselves. Perhaps 2.5 is falling to the bottom and some pages are falling in and out, 12.5 moves up. You can see there is still a lot of flux here and then of course, just throwing off all rhyme and reason, the 2.5 goes up and is at the number 1 spot.
For test two, the 10.5%, the 4%, same kind of thing, all jumping around and nothing really settled. So obviously, there is nothing and we can’t say that keyword density doesn’t really matter and you can go as much as you’d like.
Also can’t say it the other way that some specific number is what you want. I am confident it is not that but the concept that you could just go for broke is probably not correct. These pages are all still moving up and down and that could simply be Google trying to figure out what is the correct percentage for this particular fake keyword, there might be some other things at play or the density itself might not matter at all. It is moving around quite a bit, Ryan is going to continue to keep an eye on this.
I wouldn’t subscribe to the idea that you can just do whatever you want and just go for broke. I would avoid those techniques and I know that those are being floated around in some places and I would not do that. We always evaluate it for your specific situation, look at what your competitors are doing, look at how many times they are using it, and that is a much better play than trying to get some arbitrary number or trying to figure out some way to game it. The secret is hiding in plain site, I think that will always continue to work and that is what I would advocate doing.