3 Things That Could Hurt Your Search Engine Rankings

Good day friends! I hope you all have been having a nice time blogging. Now if you’re a fan of my blog, you’d have noticed that I do not like to play around the bush when it comes to dishing out quality useful information. I love getting straight to the point and making everything comprehensive enough. If you’re new to my site, please pardon my boasting. :)

Well, today we shall take a look into some issues that could actually hurt our online rankings. As we all know, search engine recognition is something every website owner craves for and a lot of people are ready to spend a lot just to get top listing. But just as you’re building this recognition, have you given a thought to some issues that could also hamper its progress?

In some of my previous blog posts, I wrote something about the last penguin update which in term was related to the newly updated exact match domain issue. If you have read these posts, you’d have noticed that they explain more about how the search engine robots intend to hurt low quality websites and sites using aggressive promotional approaches. But there’s more to these updates. Not only do keyword stuffing and over optimization hurt your rankings, there’re also some other issues that could even hurt the more if they are not taken into consideration. Now let’s take a quick look into them;

1.         Broken Links

Nothing hurts your site more than this. Simply put, broken links are links that may either be nonfunctional or have been removed by the web owner. This occurs when the link to a particular webpage or article have been changed. To avoid having such on your site, it is of wise practice to always check your site regularly to fix broken links and ensure all links on your site are functional. Broken Link Check is one good tool that could help you locate and provide the source file to any nonfunctional link on your site.

2.        Malware and Malicious Contents

Having malware or malicious contents on your site could hamper its optimization progress. Many web owners are unaware of this and it could hurt big time. When search spiders visit your site and detect any suspicious content or that your site functions as an intermediary for the infection of any sites, you could begin to drop in rankings immediately. To check if your site is in good health, copy and paste the code below on your web browser and simply replace “yoursite.com” with your own website URL.

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://yoursite.com/

3.        Aggressive Link Building

Since search engines are constantly looking for consistent results to keep the internet mobile with top quality information, site with relevant links and contents are given favourable preferences. Due to these reasons, a lot of people tend to build links aggressively to gain search recognition. If your site just starts and gets tons of links (say 10,000 links from a link farm) on the first month and then you add an additional 50 on the next month, search robots will filter all your work and you’d surely drop in rankings. It is however best for you to build backlinks gradually and naturally through directory submission, RSS feed submission, social bookmarking, article marketing, video marketing and submitting press releases.

Once you follow these steps by making sure your site is in good shape, you will surely begin to get some good search recognition. See to your site that it doesn’t fall victim to any of these deadly menace.