7 Common Web-Content Mistakes That Affect Your SEO

Author: Karan Chopra Founder & CEO at G2One Network and Editor at I2Mag (Internet and Design Inspiration Magazine) loves design, technology, and Out of box thinking.

Right from the day 1, when we launch our site, our first major aim is to bring the site on Google Page 1 and for that we usually opt for Search Engine Optimization or in simple words, SEO. Why we do this? We do have a believe from quite a long time, even seen examples from other site that a proper SEO activity help us to achieve our site aim to reach at no.1.

But, often it happens in the case, we do are getting good traffic in the starting and suddenly seeing the shark biting out sites – the major reason here is the change in Google algorithm – Google’s unlike Panda update; the updates that the search giant brings from time to time dazzled all our SEO efforts and it simply results in losing of huge percentage of traffic.

There are simple steps you can take care of, to protect yourself from the Google’s regular updates.

Mistake 1: Thin or Shallow Content

Sounds crazy but Google Panda do this – usually known bias and targeting the sites with thin or shallow content. If you site pages having less than 100 words on them, it will affect you definitely. You can have a look on the page more properly and can remove them completely and do leave them to 404. There are possibly good content, according to you that you feel will be good for your visitors, but because of the update results in flagged by the new Google algorithm.

Mistake 2: Duplicate URLs

Major problem, you usually have dropdown lists in some of navigation links on your site. These links usually get indexed by Google with [?menu] parameters in the urls, which results and ends as duplicate urls for not only one, but for number of pages. You can simply replace the dropdowns with simple [a href] links and can put canonical tags on all the pages.

Another thing you can keep a check on is that your [Disallow] syntax in robots.txt file, say suppose if you are putting the syntax as [Disallow:/*?], it means you are disallowing all the queries, and not allowing Google as well as other search engines to crawl your content.

One more thing is that we often put up one article in number of categories, tag as well as sometimes in monthly archive pages. Earlier, this was not a problem as all the content considered as single i.e. individual content (no duplicate content), but now the case is different. For this, you can opt for Yoast Meta Robots plugin which will help you to noindex all the duplicate urls you have in your site.

Mistake 3: Social Media Buttons Missing

We are living in the world of social networking where our day starts and ends with sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. In the same way, it is at par important to include all these buttons on your site to get efficient results. It will not take more than few minutes of you to install all of them, but once installed, gives a lot better results event if you have imagined.

Mistake 4: Server Location

You might be thinking that how this blog speed and server location would be a mistake – answer is simple, Yes, it will be. Suppose, you are sitting in India and running your site through India-based server, than how come it shows some other location says UK as your server location at WHOIS. This will definitely sounds strange; even it is a problem actually as it gives a wrong sign of doing to Google. In this case, just switch your host to a better and relevant host like the one I am using Hostgator.

Mistake 5: Blog Speed

Another big problem is your server speed or you can say your blog speed, the time I checked mine own site at webpagetest.org, I found that speed somehow uncertain and I quickly discuss the matter with mine hosting company and they suggested me to use WP supercache plugin, since my magazine is WordPress-based and the day I started using it, I had seen an amazing change in loading time. This somehow sounds technical but actually it is not.

Mistake 6: Running Sister Sites

Say, you have two or three sites, with almost similar niche, and you believe in order to increase the content of sites, you usually think duplicating the content – well, this is not a good practice either. Remember Google Panda hate this. One site with 1000 backlinks seems to be stronger as compared to two sites having 500 each. So, instead of opting for two sites, opt for one and you  don’t lose your traffic that you are getting of that one site. All you have to do is simply 301-redirect the one domain into another.

Mistake 7: Navigation

Navigation plays another important role and if not set properly would result in bigger mistake as well as of loosing huge visitors count. You often have seen breadcrumbs navigation, like Home>Companies>Apple, something like this or similar. Opting for this way will help you not losing your visitors and even help pagerank to flow.