While there are plenty of beneficial actions you can take to improve the ranking of your website through onsite SEO, there are also numerous mistakes that can be made that will negatively impact your site’s rank. Many of these actions are directly nefarious however some might be made incidentally. Here are five onsite SEO mistakes, why you should avoid them, and how to avoid them.
1. Duplicate Content
- What it is: Copying and pasting information, content, or full articles from other websites.
- Why it’s bad:
- Search engines (like Google) will prioritize content that is unique and will actively filter out duplicate content.
- The originality of your site will decline, pushing your site further down Google’s ranking.
- Google’s algorithms will actively suppress your website, penalizing the site for its duplicated (stolen) content.
- How to avoid it:
- Don’t steal content. Nothing more to add to this point.
- If you choose to use others content to build your ideas or frameworks, ensure you are actively changing the content, placing a spin on it, and adding your own value (through alternative viewpoints or otherwise).
- After writing your content, leverage plagiarism software to verify that none of the content was plagiarized or accidentally left unchanged. Always provide references where appropriate.
2. Invisible Assets
- What it is: Using hidden content, text or otherwise, via white-on-white keywords, invisible images, etc.
- Why it’s bad:
- Google’s algorithm will detect this content and penalize your site for including it.
- If the site does not present as a user expects it to, this will lead to poor onsite engagement and high bounce rates (users clicking on a site and immediately leaving it).
- This action directly violates Google’s guidelines and can cause your site to be removed from its index.
- How to avoid it:
- Ensure all text and images are visible to users. Audit the site to make sure this was not done accidentally.
3. Cloaking
- What it is: Showing content to the search engine that differs from what users see when on the site.
- Why it’s bad:
- This is a direct violation of Google’s guidelines and can result in a manual action penalty.
- Creates a poor user experience which will result in lower credibility through Google’s measures, leading to a worse search rank.
- How to avoid it:
- Ensure that content displayed to search engines matches user-facing content.
- Regularly audit the site to verify content matches.
4. Keyword Stuffing
- What it is: Repeating keywords excessively to attempt to boost search ranking.
- Why it’s bad:
- Content becomes unreadable and unnatural to read, degrading the user experience.
- Google’s algorithms will penalize your site, furthering the site’s decline in search ranking.
- As the user experience is degraded time spent on site will decrease and bounce rates will increase.
- How to avoid it:
- Keep keywords to just 1-2% of the word count.
- Use Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords to provide more variety and to improve your authority and credibility on a topic.
- Create high-quality, user-focused content. Focus on adding value to a user not on improving your site’s SEO. Your site will naturally rank better if you add value.
5. Sketchy Outbound Linking
- What it is: Linking to sketchy, scammy/spammy, gambling, adult, or other low-quality sites.
- Why it’s bad:
- Google will penalize your site for spammy behavior.
- Linking to low-quality sites will damage the credibility or reputation of your site, ranking it lower in search results.
- Will reduce the trust users have in your site, leading to lower engagement.
- How to avoid it:
- Only link to reputable, high-authority sources. Sites with .gov, .org, or .edu Top-Level-Domains (TLDs) are great places to link out to.
- Regularly audit outbound links to ensure all included links are to reputable sources.
Now you know what to avoid and how to avoid it. At the bare minimum always ensure you are adding value to your users. If something would reduce the experience of a user or trick them in any way it is probably poor practice. That said, stay up to date with Google’s algorithm and guideline changes to make sure you are in good standing.
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