Blatant Keyword Stuffing

What's the consensus opinion?

[threecrans]

I'm sure this has been addressed here but I couldn't find a good thread.

Recently, I have discovered some competitors climbing the serps who blatantly "keyword stuff" their content. i.e., they have a paragraph at the top of their body page content which looks like the following:

"keywords: keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3, etc."

Obviously this technique flies in the face of good content writing but there doesn't seem to be anything intrinsically wrong with it outside of that. They aren't hiding keywords by using "white text" or other spam tactics, and the keywords are related to the actual page content.

It appears that this technique works well for major search engines (at least in our keyword market). Are search engines likely to "crack down" on this in the future? How does this "block of keywords" appear to users? Are they more likely to label it as spam? Does anyone here successfully employ a similar tactic? What's the consensus?

[tedster]

When I see this as a user (forgetting anything I think I know about search engine rank) I actually have a positive response. I like seeing a "capsule summary" of the subjects that the page focuses on (especially if it's a long page) as long as the list isn't over extended to a silly extreme.

Will the search engines penalize or ignore this in the future? Only they know for sure.

[jlr1001]

However, summerizing topics doesn't sound like what those sites are doing.

If I'm writing content for a site that sells sports cars there's a world of difference between:

1. Popular features, 2. Brands and models of cars in our lot, 3. How you can prequalify yourself for financing, 4. Locate a lot near you

and:

cars, sports cars, great used car deals, buy a car today, no money down, pre-owned . . .

One actually outlines the following content while the other is just a list of phrases and words. It seems to me that one is of more value to site visitors than the other.

[xbase234]

Yes, there would be a difference between keyword stuffing in the <h> tags, versus a legit description. A precise description of relevant content is true optimization; the other is somewhat questionable. I would be willing to bet that a case against <h> keyword stuffing could be successfully argued to Google, if it really came down to it.

[brotherhood of LAN]

Do you mean having a bit like "keywords a b c?"

I see loads of pages like that, and as tedster says, are especially handy for those huge long documents where you can just scan over the keywords to make sure the doc is talking about the right stuff.

Google [www-db.stanford.edu] as an SE even do it themselves.....I think xbase's mentionin of H tags being used here to "spam" might make them change their minds about having "useful" keyword summaries though.