8 Things Google Hates & Common SEO Mistakes. So Don’t Do Them

If you’ve done any (or many) of the things below, you may be punching your screen when you drop from the search results. We are looking specifically at what hurts your site’s search rankings, and this list is not all-inclusive, but it covers many of the practices that can cause your site to show up less frequently or not at all in the search results.

Buying Links & Paid Link Building Campaigns

You may have heard that if another website links to your site, it benefits your search rankings. This is true. However, how did that link get on that other website? Was it placed there because you had something interesting on your site that someone wanted to link to? That’s excellent. Did you pay someone $100 to put your link in the footer of their site, and it just so happens that the word in the link (anchor text) is a very highly searched term that has a lot of competition? That’s bad. Many companies, including large corporations, have been penalized for buying links. Don’t do it.

Over the course of the last few years, we’ve had to do MANY disavow files to help companies resolve link-building penalties. While a disavow file can help you get back into Google’s good graces, it takes time to identify the problem and is a major pain that can set back your SEO campaign by years.

The site above got nailed for paid links but has started rebounding after an extensive disavow file was created. If you’re currently being penalized, talk with us about our Google SEO recovery services.

Google Hates A Site Full of Ads

If your website’s real estate is covered with trash, it is not very welcome in Google’s neighborhood. It’s not a bad thing to want to make a little money by having advertisements on your site. However, if it’s difficult to separate the ads from the content and if the ads are intrusive enough to provide what Google considers a “bad experience” for the user, your search rankings will falter.

Hidden Text Hurts SEO

Text to the Googlebot is like chocolate to you and me. It loves to find text, gather it, and add it to its database. There is a bad practice that some site owners and webmasters follow, and that is hiding this text so that only the search bots can find it. This is done by having white text on a white background or by manipulating the code of the web page to hide text from a person visiting the site, yet enabling a search engine crawler to “see” it without difficulty. Being sneaky like this is a great way to get your site banned from Google’s search results.

Does Google Hate Small Businesses?

OK, hate my be a harsh word here, but its becoming more and more apparent with each algorithm update. You may have noticed that the first page of the search results are more and more being monopolized by big brands. Conduct a search for a popular item to buy, for example a dishwasher, do you see any small companies in the organic (not paid) search results? We don’t either.

If your business is online only, it is becoming more difficult to compete with the big brands when it comes to search rankings. You may have the best prices and top-notch customer service, but to Google, if you’re not a Fortune 500 company, then you’re not going to be on page 1 for the most competitive search terms. This is one of the reasons to have a search engine optimization specialist work on your site, to use their expertise and knowledge in order to have your site rank up there with the big boys. You also may want to run a PPC campaign.

One way to battle the big brands is to be niche. We’ve seen niche websites, focusing on specific products and categories, be able to rank above Amazon and other major retailers. Focus your product line and content you deliver for better results.

Google Won’t Rank Thin Content

A common practice among site owners trying to manipulate search results is to create thousands of pages targeting different keyword search terms and having very little useful content for their visitors. If a web page’s content consists of a short paragraph of text with a search term used abundantly within the text, it’s not very useful to a visitor and Google will not provide you with any good rankings.

Duplicate Content

Google is looking for new and fresh content to add to its huge database. If it finds the same content it found on another website, it’s not going to show much interest in what you have to offer. If your site sells a product and has the same product description provided by the manufacturer that every other website selling that product is using, that is considered duplicate content. If you post an article on your blog from one of those free article sites that several other blogs have already posted, that is also considered duplicate content. Make everything on your site original and unique, and watch your search results improve.

Text In Images or Animations

As mentioned previously in this article, Google is looking for text. Images and other web animations sometimes go beyond what can be done with standard HTML. The search robot that Google uses is not very good at reading these types of files, although they have been improving. Google has stated that it has the ability to read text within images now, but in our opinion, that text is still less valuable than true text on your website. Morale of the story? Don’t bury any type of quality content into images or non-readable files. Google doesn’t like it.

Slow Sites & Poor Core Web Vitals