Keyword stuffing refers to the excessive and unnatural use of keywords, which harms readability and can lead to search engine penalties. Effective keyword optimization focuses on strategic, context-driven placement of relevant terms to improve rankings while maintaining a natural user experience.

Search Engine Journal has answered the question, ‘What Is The Threshold Between Keyword Stuffing & Being Optimized?’.

Adam Riemer says, “There is no such thing as “being optimized” when it comes to keywords and repetitions. This is similar to looking at “authority” scores for domains. The optimization scores you get are measurements based on what an SEO tool thinks gives a domain trust, and not the actual search engines or LLM and AI systems. The idea of a keyword needing to be repeated is from an SEO concept called keyword density, which is a result of SEO tools.

Each tool would have a different way to say if you repeated a word or phrase enough for it to be “SEO friendly,” and because people trust the tools, they trust that this is a valid ranking factor or signal for a search engine. It is not because the search engines do not pay attention to how many times a word is on a page or in a paragraph, as that doesn’t produce a good experience.

Panda reduced the effectiveness of low-quality, keyword-stuffed content, and Google’s later advancements, BERT and MUM, allowed better understanding of context, relationships between terms, and the overall structure of a page. Google is now far better at interpreting meaning without relying on repeated exact-match keywords.”

What Is The Threshold Between Keyword Stuffing & Being Optimized?

Search Engine Journal