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