In a study conducted by seomoz.org, 37 leaders in search engine optimization voted on factors 
negatively impacting organic search engine rankings. There is a lot of mention made of ways to increase search engine rankings, but far less written about things consciously or inadvertently done to negatively impact rankings.
According to the experts, here are the top five ways to prevent suppressed rankings or to send your current rankings on a downward spiral.
- Server is down: A website down for 48 consecutive hours will suffer with the search engines. No one wants to click a link and be sent on a futile mission. A site frequently down for sporadic periods may also suffer, but “frequent” is the operative word. If your site is frequently down, it’s time to get a new hosting company!
- Duplicate content: The jury is out as to the extent duplicate content affects site rankings, but it can range from simply not getting indexed to a huge problem. Duplicate content alone, may not impact rankings, but it could add to the cumulative affect of other bad behavior. Unique, high quality content should be your goal if you’re serious about conducting business on the Internet.
- Low quality links: As reported in my last article, “Obtain high quality inbound links to drive web traffic,” the experts agree that a slew of poor quality links can hurt your rankings. Many of the link farms have been cleaned up, some have gone legitimate, but the fact is fewer high quality links will enhance your rankings quicker than a laundry list of low quality links.
- Duplicate Titles and Meta Tags: Duplicate titles and Meta tags on every page of your site will suppress organic rankings. It discourages crawlers from continuing deeper into your site to index more pages. With this simple fix, you may see a boost in rankings.
- Overused keywords: Sites excessively using keywords will either be ignored or suffer with lower rankings. Trying to trick the crawlers to rank you higher by purposefully stuffing content with keywords is not a winning strategy. Use keywords as often as they make sense for the reader and the crawlers will respond in kind.
Have questions about search engine optimization? Visit my website at www.strategywriter.com.
To learn more about search engine optimization:
Obtain quality inbound links to drive web traffic
External links are golden for generating web traffic
Unlock the messages your web traffic is sending
Use video to increase website traffic
In the dark about search engine optimization?
How well is your website performing?
10 fast facts about higher organic rankings
Create an SEO blueprint to improve your website
How to gather competitive online data
5 ways to make keywords key in SEO
Comments
Hi Deb,
This are simple, useful tips. I am a certified marketing professional but I am often looking for simple tips to apply to my own business. I like lists that tell you what not to do so that you can remove the negative experience for a customer and work ideas that do work. I specialize in online training but this info is help no matter what industry you are in.
Thanks
Thanks for your comment, Bee.
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