Keyword Stuffing Question

[Mike.Bean]

Say your on a e-commerce category page "Shirts"

every lower level category has "shirts" in it such as: T-shirt, long sleeve shirt, sweat shirt, v-neck shirt, and so on.

Is this page going to be penalized in google for the keyword "shirts" just because it is in the title and on the page a thousand times because i'm targetting words like "long sleeve shirt?

and if it is, will the "long sleeve shirt" keyword be negatively affected as well?

Answer much appreciated,
Thanks in advance.

[Gyorgy.B]

Google is pretty "smart" and will understand that it is an e-commerce site with thousands of products and it won't penalize your site for keyword stuffing, but make sure you follow Google's guidelines, such as: category and product pages have unique page titles, H1 headings, image ALT tags, meta descriptions and all the other basic on-site elements make sense.

Also, it's recommended to use structured data for breadcrumbs, so the search robot will understand the information architecture of your website.

Sometimes it's difficult, but it's also a good practice to add a few sentences to at least the major category and sub-category pages. E.g. some intro text about the wide range of shirt, brands, etc, so this on-page content will make the category pages more unique and more relevant.

[GastonRiera]

Hi Mike,

Just as Gyorgy.B said, Google is pretty smart and does realize that is crawling an E-Commerce site. The problem that you're mentioning has already been asked, and it might be of some help:
How to avoid keyword stuffing on e-commerce - Moz Q&A Keyword stuffind - E-commerce websites - Moz Q&A

Also, I'd recommend you to take a deep lonn read of these article, them will clarify you a lot about keywords stuffing and, generaly, about SEO on e-commerce:
5 things about Keyword stuffing and SEO SEO for E-commerce websites - KissMetrics
What is keyword stuffing - E-commerce

Of course, the general advise is to avoid this issue. I strongly recommend that ecommerce pages shuold be filled with content. At least some text that differenciate one page from another.
Hope this was helpful

GR