Keyword Stuffing and Product Reviews

[LaceyVapeWild]

Hello Fellow Mozzers!

I am pretty new the SEO world and have been tasked with improving our companies SEO with no prior knowledge of anything to do with SEO as of about 5 months ago.

So far, I have been fairly successful (May be luck).

There is a product page on our website that has moved from Rank 8-9 all the way up to Rank 3, on a high volume keyword, which increased our traffic to that URL by 500%! I was very proud of this accomplishment until tragedy struck... We suddenly dropped to Rank 6.

It doesn't look like we've lost any Backlinks to this URL. My suspicion is that we got penalized for Keyword Stuffing since we recently changed from have multiple pages for a specific product's reviews to having them all on one page (To decrease the number of URLs our Site has). Many of these product reviews have the Keyword in them making us have over 30 of this specific keyword on our page.

Could this be a valid suspicion? Should we go back to having different URLs for reviews and Disallow them for Robots?

[evolvingSEO]

Hello!

Welcome to the world of SEO, and Moz

Before making any big changes, I would do a few things:

• Keep an eye on your daily rankings for the top keywords to that page. Quite often these sort of rankings changes are normal to a certain degree. I would give it some time and keep an eye on the flux to get a sense for how much they are moving around.
• To piggyback on that, definitely be sure to track / watch rankings and metrics for many keywords, not just the top volume keyword.
• Also - did you see a NET loss in organic traffic to the page also? Sometimes, because of all the long tail keywords, despite losing ranking for a top keyword, you may not lose much traffic.
• Track competitors rankings too! You'll probably also see their rankings shifting around a lot - and this is a great way to tell if the ranking changes are just 'normal' for your space.

As you can see, a lot of good SEO is about having clear data that paints the whole picture

Now to your question specifically, I highly doubt that would trigger a keyword stuffing issue. Google is pretty good at mapping out the contents of the page. They likely know this is user generated content, and don't count keywords in there the same way they do you 'main' content.

I would dig around for common accessibility or technical issues - like mobile friendliness, do a fetch and render in Search Console (and make sure the images etc are accessible) etc.

But in short, unless you see a very clear drop in rankings, traffic across many pages and many keywords it's likely 'business as usual' with normal algo fluxuations 

[LaceyVapeWild]

Thanks so much for your insight, I used the MOZ on page grader and it flagged for Keyword Stuffing for that reason, that's what got me worried. Knowing that Google can tell that reviews are natural consumer generated content puts my concerns at ease. It must just be a natural ranking shift.

Hopefully we'll shift back up to the top 3 soon!