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I have a product listing page that has product offers in "li" tags. Each of these products has attribute titles such as price, voltage and rating.

Since the words price, voltage and rating are repeated for each item, their density on page is legitimately high.

Will the page be penalized by Google crawler for word repetition ?

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  • This could depend on some factors. How many products do you list on a page? How high does this count get to? – closetnoc Jan 14 '15 at 18:39
  • Close to 50 per page. Density reaches 7% for each of these. – Build80 Jan 14 '15 at 18:43
  • Do you use schema.org mark-up? – closetnoc Jan 14 '15 at 18:48
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Excessive word repetition or "keyword stuffing" can make your page less likely to rank for the overused words. If you are trying to rank for phrases containing "price", "voltage", or "rating", you product lists are going to make it harder.

As long as your page is appealing to users and doesn't seem stilted or spammy, the page as a whole is unlikely to get penalized from ranking for all search terms. You will still likely be able to rank for name of the product itself.

The best way to know if you look spammy is to ask people that are not associated with your site questions like:

  • Does this page look high quality and professional?
  • How would you react if you landed on this page after searching for X?
  • Is there anything you see on this page that you don't think anybody would be interested in?

Using a word on lots of different pages will make it appear on the content keywords list in Google Webmaster Tools. I have several sites where using a word in a template caused a word to be at the top of this list, despite the word being tangentially related to the topic of the website at best. This has never caused any problems for any of these sites. We never ended up ranking for those keywords, nor did we notice any penalties in general.

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  • Do you have any thoughts on schema.org for helping to keep out of trouble in situations like this? My thought was that this could be a clue to Google that these words are legitimate and not intended to be spammy. I was certainly concerned about the word density. It is high. My question is, What is a safe threshold? Years ago, I would have said 7% was within a safe range but at the very top of the limit, but these days, I rather suspect it is much too high for any page. – closetnoc Jan 14 '15 at 19:13
  • I've never used microdata on my webpages. I don't believe they help with SEO except in cases where Google shows something special in the SERPs because of them (like star ratings). – Stephen Ostermiller♦ Jan 14 '15 at 19:14
  • I've also never put much stock in keyword density. It has never correlated well enough with rankings to be something to worry about. Keyword stuffing can lead to ranking issues, but since the heavily used keywords aren't the ones that he wants ranking, I wouldn't expect that to be a problem here. – Stephen Ostermiller♦ Jan 14 '15 at 19:17
  • I agree about density except that it can be a clue that something will bite you in the back-sides. In fact, I hate the whole density topic because it is junk. I also found that mark-up and bread-crumbs are far over-rated. I just thought it would be a clue that the terms were not intended to be spammy. I wondered if you had any ideas on it. If I were a betting man, I would place a bet on yes mark-up is taken as a clue. But I have no real data on that to be sure. Just picking your brain. ;-) Hope it didn't hurt... – closetnoc Jan 14 '15 at 19:23
  • Thank you for the answers. I do not want to be ranked for these keywords. :) – Build80 Jan 15 '15 at 2:49

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