• Redirects: So many people think they can buy a number of domain names and direct hem all to the same URL. Sometimes that’s necessary, but the search engines don’t like a lot of these.
• Bad, dead links: If your web visitors are hitting your 404 page (error for “page not found”), it’s a bad thing, and the search engines take note.
• Too many links listed: In the days of Web 1.0 there were many niche advertising directories. In part, these existed to help supply an Internet of poor search engines with relevant listings. But these days, too many links on a page dilutes the page quality in the eyes of the search engines. Which links should the crawlers follow? The fewer the better, in the search engines’ eyes. Again, such listings may be necessary for other purposes. If so, realize that the page won’t be great for SEO.
• Long page-load times: Multiple factors can contribute to long page-load times: too much page content or copy, too many visitors for the size of the server, too many large media files, and so on. Crawlers don’t like long page-load times. Nor do web visitors. And so it becomes a vicious cycle. • Irrelevant content or links: Google likes relevancy. And it doesn’t like black-hat SEOs who try to trick search engines by creating landing pages or link lists for myriad other clients. Relevant copy, relevant directories, and association pages—these are the ways to grow positive search results.
• Keyword oversaturation: Fifteen years ago people would stuff their sites with meta tags of all the keywords they could think of. Seven years ago, SEOs would stuff the page with their repeated keywords. Google likes natural copy flow. A good general rule is to include your full primary keyword phrase in your headline and two or three times within your blog post or page copy. Overdo it and Google will penalize you. Likewise, you will be penalized for using the same keyword phrase repeatedly across your website. So cool it with the keywords. Fifteen years ago people would stuff their sites with meta tags of all the keywords they could think of. Seven years ago, SEOs would stuff the page with their repeated keywords. Google likes natural copy flow. A good general rule is to include your full primary keyword phrase in your headline and two or three times within your blog post or page copy. Overdo it and Google will penalize you. Likewise, you will be penalized for using the same keyword phrase repeatedly across your website. So cool it with the keywords.
Tip: Simple Search Engine Test for Results
It’s not enough to search for your keywords in a search engine to see if you come up in results. You have to neutralize your results by dumping your browser cookies and history. The various search engines do this differently, but, for example, Firefox allows you to go to the top menu option for History and select Show All History—at which point you can select all and delete them.
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