In a previous entry, we discussed what keyword density is and why it is still used so commonly, despite the fact that it is no longer a major part of any of the search engine algorithms. To help you fully understand saturation, and how it became a decrepit shell of a technique, this entry will go into the history of keyword density.
In the early days of the search engine, density was one of the best tools to determine how relevant your site was to the topic. It was a relatively major upgrade. Prior to the use of density, the search engines and directories, their predecessor, simply accepted the information submitted by webmaster. With keyword density playing a role in the search engine results, you could rest assured that the site you visited at least contained the words you searched for.
Different search engines preferred different amounts of keyword saturation. AltaVista became famous for how it handled keyword saturation with SEO, since targeting your density to exactly two-point-three percent meant that your site would almost certainly land on the front page. As people began figuring out how the search engines handled this information, webmasters began abusing keyword saturation techniques.
It went beyond merely repeating the keyword a few times to get the desired results. Users would “stuff” keywords into the text, repeating a large number of keywords in a nonsensical paragraph at the bottom of the page. They would create multiple pages with identical information, just to fill up the entire page of results with different locations on their site.
The search engines responded by altering their algorithms, with Google leading the way in adopting alternate methods for ranking sites. By the mid 2000s, link relevance soared above saturation as an important factor. By 2006, all the major search engines gave keyword saturation little or no relevance in the ranking of the site. As of 2010, none of the top ten search engines give keyword saturation and repetition any weight. As such, any webmaster or content writer should focus on creating quality content that’s likely to get links – not keyword repetition.
