No, having 2% keyword density and a minimum 300-word count is not an “industry standard.”
That uproar you hear? It’s SEOs calling out Google today.
Google’s new Digital Marketing & E-commerce certification course, which was announced May 2, includes cringe-worthy SEO advice so shockingly bad that one of Google’s search advocates – Danny Sullivan – is disavowing it.
What happened. It all started with a tweet from international SEO consultant Gianluca Fiorelli. In it, he shared this screenshot of a slide discussing how to avoid keyword stuffing:
This is Google’s official advice from the course:
- Write more than 300 words on your webpage.
- Your webpage is more likely to be ranked higher in search engine result pages if you write a higher volume of quality content.
- Keep your keyword density below an industry standard of 2%.
- This means that 2% of the words on the webpage or fewer should be target keywords.
- Be thoughtful about keyword placement.
- Your keywords should be used only once in the following places on each page within your website: page title, subheading, first paragraph, and body conclusion.
“Seriously… ‘write more than 300 words’? and ‘keyword density’?” Fiorelli tweeted. “I mean… keyword stuffing is bad, sure! but solving it by spreading SEO myths that SEOs try to eliminate?
“I know that this course is very entry-level, but exactly for this reason myths like these ones should not be taught. Did the SEOs in Google review the course?”