Top 5 Overlooked SEO Mistakes
There are a lot of talk about SEO since Panda and Penguin, and lots of web masters are trying to cope with the changes that impacted their site traffic. Some of the common pundits are little content vs. html markup code, automated content generation by web scraping, keyword stuffing, buying external links to increase page rank among many more.
Since Google has been fairly vague about the implications in Panda and Penguin, speculations about what impacts Google Search ranking are rampant and highly discussed. Here are 5 mistakes that are not commonly discussed when trying to improve a site’s ranking and should be considered in any clean up attempt.
The top 5 overlooked SEO mistakes
Spelling errors
A site containing lots of spelling errors is likely to get degraded in the Google index. Not only is there a high suspicion of a crawler bot, but your content is not providing a good user experience either. Anyway you look at it, a high count of spelling errors mean you one doesn’t care much about good, quality content.
Slice and mix content
Duplicate content is a known problem, it’s been highly discussed. But unless there is a high amount of duplication, it’s not that impacting according to Matt Cutts, head of search at Google. But there are sites that contain mostly assembled snippets from other web pages. Don’t think that Google won’t detect it.
Links from internal sites
If you’re hosting multiple site with the same subnet IP address, and link them excessively you’re setting your sites up for punishment. Especially if you have a link on every site that just points to another’s home page is very suspicious and obvious. If there is a reason you must do so, add a nofollow tag to the link. This way Google will ignore it. Otherwise you’re better off removing them.
Hidden text
Hiding text containing keywords is a big one. Especially if it’s stuffed with h1 tags. I mean who would hide the most important text (as an H1 test should be) on their pages? If for technical reasons you must hide text, rather than hiding it move it off the page with a position value in css.
Not using webmaster tools
If you’re running a web site and are serious about SEO, and not using webmaster tools you’re missing out. Google provides many insights and tools for investigating and improving your site. You’ll find search traffic volume, index status, html improvements and much more.
