Frequent Errors That Damage SEO Rankings

We all know the importance of organic search ranking and understand the difficulty to stay on top of best practices. All sites are bound to have some SEO errors that directly impact your rankings, and if you’re experiencing some of these, you are not alone.

To help uncover some of these common technical SEO errors, let’s take a deep dive into the common issues that are hurting rankings.

Duplicate Content

When you have two or more duplicate pages, search engines do not know which page to crawl and display in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

There are many ways around this, but the best advice would be to use a canonical tag, which tells search engines which pages are preferred to be indexed.

Legacy No-index Tags

When you want to hide a page for search results, you use a “noindex” tag. Sometimes users forget to remove this, meaning that search engines ignore pages that otherwise should be ranking.

To avoid this prevalent mistake, it’s a good idea to keep a list of all “noindex” tagged pages.

Orphaned Pages On Your Website

An orphan page is not linked to any other page on your site, meaning a user can’t get to the page without knowing the direct URL.

Commonly these are marketing landing pages. These pages can’t be followed from other pages by search engines, which means the likes of Google very rarely index them.

For search engines to crawl your site effectively, they must link to other pages within your website.

Backlinks From Poor Quality Pages

Gaining links from other websites to yours is crucial in improving rankings in search engines. But when it comes to link building, it’s quality over quantity that makes the difference.

Although each backlink is theoretically a vote of confidence in your site, the links from sites with high domain authority are the links you want.

These tell search engines that a trusted authority vouches for your content. Even a no-follow link from a high DA site can boost rankings.

On the opposite side of the spectrum are backlinks from spammy, low DA websites, which will not help your rankings. Often toxic backlinks not only harm your rankings but also result in penalties from the search engines.

Tools like SemRush will scan and grade all backlinks. There are many ways to address any toxic backlinks. For example, you could contact the website administrator and ask for the link to be removed or use Google’s Disavow Tool to remove these links.

Not Using Browser Caching

Browser caching is the ability to use a browser to store website files locally on a users computer, allowing the files to loan locally the next time the user visits the website.

Caching reduces the time for a website page to load, significantly impacting search engine ranking.

Using IFrames On your Website Build

Search engines consider the content from IFrames belongs to another website, so the best you can hope for is no effect.

Because the content doesn’t technically live within the page’s code, content within the IFrame is classed as ‘invisible’ to search engines and often leads to low-quality pages with minimal content.

IFrames can also hurt load speeds and experiences scores as they can be susceptible to contain malware, are confusing, and people generally don’t like them.

Low Content Pages

If your post or webpage is short, it may be regarded as not doing the topic justice, and Google may deem the content “low value”.

That’s not to say word count is the one defining ranking factor, and what matters is that that content explains what the reader is there to learn.

Overall, it will be more difficult to rank as you simply won’t be using enough keywords and semantically linked words to answer your user’s questions satisfactorily.

Conclusion

It’s important not to fall into these frequent SEO errors as they really can impact your search ranking efforts.

By making some simple changes, you will see an improvement in your ranking and click-through rates quickly and will be portioned for SEO success moving forward.

If you want to discuss your SEO challenges in more detail, click here and continue the conversation with one of our search experts.