Repetitive Speaker and Keyword Stuffing Penalty

[Oren.]

This question is a little bit on the whimsical side.

Let's say you have a video on your page, and a transcript of said video.  The speaker has a tendency to repeat a certain (key)word, somewhat excessively.  Maybe it's an important term for a technical video, maybe it's a nervous thing, whatever -- that word is in there a lot.  If you include a video transcript, could you get slapped with a keyword stuffing penalty for excessive use of said word?

[danatanseo]

Whimsical Answer: If Search Engine's penalized for this then Christina Aguilera's videos from the first two seasons of The Voice would be de-indexed for the phrase "I mean...you know" [To her credit she must have spent some time watching those playbacks because she's much better this season]

Plain old ordinary answer: To my knowledge, search engines (Google included) do not impose a "keyword stuffing penalty" per se. However, it's entirely possible that the content could be devalued based on quality. Any one of a number of things can indicate to a search engine that visitors found the content uninteresting or useless or even redundant. If social signals are poor, bounce rate is high, time spent on the page is poor, and the depth to which visitors went (i.e. how far down the page did they scroll) is poor, the SERPs are most likely going to reflect that. If the content isn't substantially unique, doesn't add anything new or interesting to already existing content on the WEB and it's uber spammy, Google may just decide not to index it at all. I suppose you could call that a penalty, however, I highly doubt that it would be removed from the index if it received any social signals indicating that someone found it to be of value....even if it just irritated the heck out of them.

My educated guess is that the worse that would happen is that it might not rank very well for the overly repeated term.

Hope that's helfpul!

[crackingmedia]

Hi Oren

Yes, it is a little bit whimsical!

Unless the speaker shouldn't really be speaking because he says the word super excessively I don't believe you would have an issue. Google states the following regarding keyword stuffing:

"Keyword stuffing" refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google search results. Often these keywords appear in a list or group, or out of context (not as natural prose)

Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural, for example:

We sell custom cigar humidors. Our custom cigar humidors are handmade. If you’re thinking of buying a custom cigar humidor, please contact our custom cigar humidor specialists at custom.cigar.humidors@example.com.

Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358?hl=en

Does your speaker speak as unnaturally as that? It would be very odd if they did.

I think it will be OK.

Peter

[crackingmedia]

I love your whimsical answer Dana

Peter

[Oren.]

No -- thankfully it's not that bad.  Thanks for the answer!

[Oren.]

Thanks, that's very helpful.  Signals on the video are mostly positive, I was just a bit worried about the repetitive word, but I guess I really should have been focusing on the user experience, which is just fine.