That SEO consultant's keyword advice backfired hilariously
Hired a guy from a Dallas agency to fix our blog. He said we needed to stuff 300 words of keyword salad into every post. I questioned it, he said, "Google loves density, trust me." We did it for a month. Our rankings for anything related dropped like a rock. Worse, our top post about lawn care started showing up for "spicy pickle recipes." Zero idea how. Spent 400 bucks on that mess. Fired him and reverted everything. Has anyone else gotten advice so confidently wrong it broke your site?
Oh man this hits home so hard. We had some guy tell us the exact same thing about keyword density back in like 2019, and he was SO sure about it too. Told us Google counts how many times a word shows up and rewards you for hitting a magic number. We stuffed our pages so full of the same phrase over and over that the posts barely made sense to actual humans anymore. Traffic tanked within weeks and one of our old product pages started ranking for some random thing about bird feeders, which we have never sold in our lives. The worst part is these guys always say it with total confidence so you feel dumb for doubting them. That pickle thing you mentioned is hilarious but also exactly how dumb this stuff gets.