I see so many people warning against keyword stuffing that I decided to put it to the test. Using a website I manage, I stuffed the keyword META tag with different variations of the keyword, and haven't seen any penalty. Read about my keyword stuffing experiment. I know that META tags don't play much of a role in SEO any longer, but it remains to be seen if keyword stuffing will actually get you penalized.
Have you tried "keyword stuffing" the pages content? It would be interesting to see what happens when you actually do this to the text on the page.
It's been several months, and the rankings in both Yahoo and MSN have stayed high, while my Google rank has slowly been rising. @gatorade: I'm too nervous to do that - it's definitely considered black hat to stuff your page with keywords. Maybe I'll create a separate, throw-away site and run the experiment again.
The meta tags have been ignored as a ranking criteria by google a long time.....it is sometimes used as the description for your page in the serps
Yep, I knew that - but all the dire warnings against keyword stuffing are a lot of hot air. At the worst, the stuffed keywords get ignored. And to clarify, I didn't stuff the description META tag - I like visitors clicking through to my sites!
I don't think that most of the people that give that advice meant stuffing intot your meta tags. Those don't even count. If you want to do a real experiment, then stuff your page content and see what happens to your rank. Which meta tag did you stuff with keywords? If you stuffed the keywords tag, then it wouldn't do anything anyway because they dont even count that one anymore!
There's no way I'd keyword stuff the content on the page - I know what would happen. More than one "expert" warned me that stuffing the keywords META Tag was a way to get banned. I tried it and it hasn't hurt me, and from my experience has even helped a bit with Yahoo and MSN. Since Google simply ignores the keywords META Tag for the most part, keyword stuffing in the META Tag can't hurt you any.