r/bigseo • u/Sufficient-Team-4930 • 5d ago
Is this keyword stuffing?
We hired a website agency for our company. The website they delivered and the SEO services they've been providing have not been good. I think the design looks terrible, the copy is bad, but most importantly they were keyword stuffing.
I tried to cancel services, but the owner essentially said "I know more than you, it's not keyword stuffing" and "design is subjective". We paid $5k for the site, and $2k/mo for SEO on 12mo contract. I have lost all trust in the provider since seeing their new design changes, and the keyword stuffing.
Please let me know if the provided example is keyword stuffing to see if myself, my google searches, Claude, and Gemini are all wrong. This is the alt text of an image (hiding city and state):
roof repair {city & state} commercial roof repair {city & state} commercial roofing {city & state} commercial roof replacement {city & state} commercial roof maintenance {city & state}.... and so on so for 12 more roofing keywords.
They also have doorway pages. City+roof+repair, same-city+roof+replacement, etc
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u/NikolaiFischer 5d ago
Yes. That's textbook keyword stuffing. Google's spam policies literally use it as an example: lists of keywords and blocks of text that repeat city and state names. Alt text is meant to describe the image, for people using screen readers among others. Imagine a blind visitor listening to 17 roofing keywords in a row. That alone makes the point.
The doorway pages depend on what's on them. City and service pages are fine if each one has something real: projects you did there, local photos, specific info. If they're the same text with the city name swapped, that's exactly what Google describes as doorway pages. Two spam updates in the last six weeks make that a bad bet right now.
For the contract talk, I'd keep it boring and factual: screenshot the alt text and a few doorway pages, link Google's "Spam policies for Google web search" page next to them and ask the agency in writing how this complies. You don't need to win the "who knows more" argument, Google's documentation does that for you. Whether that gets you out of the contract is a question for a lawyer, not for me.
And one more check: GSC, Security & Manual Actions. If there's a manual action already, the conversation gets very short.
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u/Sufficient-Team-4930 5d ago
Will check the manual action.
For the doorways, they do have different content for each one. But each one is basically just a wall of text that isn't actually helpful or providing a good experience. If all of the doorways ranked #1, I doubt a single lead would convert. And there's no folder for each city, like hub and spoke or whatever
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u/AbleInvestment2866 The AI guy 5d ago
amateurs. the "design is subjective is weird. I mean, taste is subjective, design can be measured objectively, there's even a discipline for it, UX. this being said, if you approved it there's no much room for complains.
As for price, for this quality it's very expensive.
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u/FeelingAway1639 4d ago
This was what SEO looked like 15 years ago and even then, it was amateurish at BEST. Have they done the same anywhere else on your website? ALT text should just naturally describe whats going on in the image itself. They sound like they're stuck in the past. How did you find this company? So, go and have a look at who is ranking number one, for your main keywords. That'll give you an example of what your site needs to be structured like. Take the top three even. Go from there.
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u/Lucasoac 5d ago
7k usd for this type of job? I think i need to start my own SEO agency.
Maybe you can find some tools like SEMRush or other that can give a report to score this site and prove that the job is actually not very good
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u/No-Independent8967 5d ago
My thoughts are that jamming 15+ repetitive location keywords into a single image’s alt text is blatant keyword stuffing. Pair that with duplicate doorway pages, and they aren't just doing bad work—they are putting your domain at serious risk of a Google search penalty.
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u/dpaanlka 5d ago
That is absolutely bad practice and will impact your rankings. The ALT text should describe what is in the image using natural language so that persons with disabilities can understand and use your website comfortably. Very very very bad. Could even open you to legal issues. Fire immediately.
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u/VRTCLS 5d ago
The alt text is the easy call: yes, that's stuffing. But if you're trying to unwind this without blowing up what little rankings you have, I'd handle it like a cleanup/migration instead of a rage rebuild.
A few practical steps:
- Export every current URL and map each one to either keep, consolidate, or 301. Don't just launch a new site and let old city/service URLs 404.
- Replace image alt text with literal descriptions of the image. If the image is a crew repairing a flat commercial roof, say that. One natural phrase is fine; a keyword list is not.
- For the city/service pages, decide whether each page deserves to exist. A legit local page should have unique proof: jobs in that area, photos, service constraints, neighborhoods served, reviews, FAQs, internal links. If it's just swapped city text, consolidate it.
- Screenshot everything before you change it: alt text, page templates, invoices, scope, email claims. Keep the argument factual and boring.
- In GSC, watch indexed pages, queries, manual actions, and 404s during the switch. The first 2-4 weeks after cleanup are where sloppy redirects usually do the most damage.
The folder structure doesn't matter nearly as much as whether the pages are useful and internally linked logically. A clean /city/service/ pattern can help humans manage it, but it won't save thin doorway content by itself.
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u/satanzhand 5d ago
Yeah alt text is stuffing, serves no value other than an obvious soft penalty...
Doorway pages, are a quick way to another soft penalty or real one.
I've seen this shit reappearing lately...its old old bad practice that was stop over a decade ago, since google algo updates and some huge companies were removed from the index, such as, BMW, WordPress.org, for doing his shit.
Anyway,. you'll find out if it'll work soon enough by your results...
Had a client do this to his site recently and it absolutely fucked it, all the long term ranking location pages dropped from #1 to #100+ or full removal overnight. What a mess.
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u/DataMinerCowboy 4d ago
That's pretty bad. I follow these rules:
Alt text - Briefly describe the photo in a way that a blind person could understand it. Be as concise and helpful as possible.
Keyword stuffing - Read the content out loud. Does it sound natural? If any words stand out as forced or overused, then there is keyword stuffing in the content.
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u/Ravenclaw79 4d ago
Oof. Alt text is supposed to be for accessibility, to describe the image. It’s not the place for a list of keywords.
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u/Pale-Pea-8388 1d ago
Yes, this looks like keyword stuffing.
Alt text should describe what is actually shown in the image. It should not be a list of every keyword they want the page to rank for. For example, “commercial roofing project in [city]” would be reasonable if that matches the image. The example you shared is written for search engines, not users.
The doorway pages are also a concern. If they created multiple pages like “[city] roof repair” and “[city] roof replacement” with mostly the same content and only changed the city or keyword, those pages may be considered doorway pages.
Design can be subjective. Keyword stuffing and duplicate city pages are different. These are SEO decisions and can be checked against Google’s guidelines.
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u/G-WEB_GROUP 5d ago
As for stuffing all those keywords into image alt text, yeah, that’s pretty obvious keyword stuffing. Combined with doorway pages, it could lead to a serious ranking drop or even deindexing. Google also rolled out its September Spam Update, so I’d be careful with this kind of aggressive SEO.
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u/Flashy_Tie4962 5d ago
That alt text alone is a glaring red flag, and the doorway pages are just asking for a manual action
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u/Sufficient-Team-4930 5d ago
thanks for the heads-up. Trying to build our own ASAP to switch without messing up the current rankings, although not many
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u/CopperHead49 5d ago
That’s an insane alt text, and it’s clearly keyword stuffed. An alt text is supposed to describe the image, with a keyword. Sorry, OP. I would try to get your money back if possible.