7 Mistakes Google Dislike and How to Fix Them

Every website wants some love from Google. A high rank on Google’s SERP can mean the difference between getting organic traffic every day and never seeing a single visitor on your site that you didn’t pay for.

The catch?

Google’s trying hard to get – or it might be if you are making some common mistakes that send signals that your website isn’t the reliable, worthwhile destination you want it to be.

The good news is that these mistakes are easy to correct. We have discussed 7 things in this post that Google hates and some quick tips to stop doing them and start receiving the organic traffic you want.

#1: Poor User Experience

When Google’s algorithms render a list of search results, the company’s goal is always to provide the best experience for any user who clicks on your website. If your website is slow to load or difficult to navigate, Google hates it and will likely relegate your site to oblivion on the second or third (or lower) page of search results.

Fortunately, there’s an easy fix. Start by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights to ensure your page has a speed of 80 or higher. You should access the Core Web Vitals Report on your Google Search Console to identify additional problems. Finally, make sure to retouch your images by using the smallest file size that delivers the results you want and minimize redirects both internally and in your outgoing links.

#2: Lack of Quality Backlinks

You might already know that building high-quality backlinks is essential for better SEO. If good authority domains are not linking back to your site, it can negatively impact your rank on Google.

The solution is not to get volumes of backlinks. A few good links are going to be more influential than a bunch of span links. You can start by searching for sites with high-authority domains and where your content might be relevant to visitors. Following that, you can contact those website administrators through email and see if they would be interested to link to your content. If they agree, make sure to discuss about anchor text. Anchor text that uses your company name or one of your priority keywords is better to anchor text that says, ‘click here’.

#3: Brief or Irrelevant Content

Irrelevant or shallow content is only going to impact your website’s rank in search engines. Google only provides top rank to contents that are in-depth and useful for the searchers. You must include related terms and subtopics to build semantic relationships and rank for long-term keywords.

There are lots of tools you can use to find related subtopics to use in your content. For example, Surfer SEO and Market Muse both provide lists of keywords, related terms, subtopics, and more. They also score content, which means you can figure out how your content will perform against your competitors’ content.

As a final note, Google Passage Ranking is now live and allows Google to highlight passages that are relevant to a searcher’s query. Having a highlighted passage can do a lot to get a searcher to click on your site. You’re more likely to benefit if you focus on creating content that’s semantically rich and relevant.

#4: Lack of Interactive Content

Words are really important in the world of SEO but they’re not the only thing that matters. Google prefers to deliver a good user experience and that means its algorithm prioritizes sites that offer more than words.

Interactive content can be in a various formats. Videos, expandable content, clickable infographics, audio clips and Java Script can all go a long way toward creating an engaging and likeable experience for the people who visit your site.

It is crucial to create interactive content that doesn’t slow your site down. Luckily, there are plenty of website templates and plugins that can help you to give visitors opportunities to interact with your content without compromising the user experience in terms of speed and navigability.

#5: Lack of Advanced HTML Tags

You’re probably already using basic HTML tags, but if you’re not also taking advantage of some advanced HTML to help Google index your content, then you might be ranked lower than you should be.

Let’s start with the meta tag, which should be engaging to readers while incorporating your most important keyword and topic. Using headings tags strategically will benefit. They’re an ideal place to incorporate questions and other long-tail keywords.

There are a few other advanced tags that you might be missing.

Noindex and Nofollow tags are good for letting Google know that you don’t consider a page to be important. They let the crawlers know that they can skip these pages.
The “Rel canonical” tag tells Google to skip redundant content.
Schema.org markup provides structural guidance and helps Google to identify your most important content to display on the SERP.

None of these additions take long and they can make a big difference in your page rank.

#6: Competing with Yourself

One of the most common mistakes I see is when companies compete with their own pages by including repetitive or unnecessary content. If you have two blog posts that include similar content and target the same keywords, they may essentially blow one another out.

The best way to rectify this mistake is to optimize similar pages for different, long-tail keywords. You may also be able to differentiate similar content by updating something older to make it up-to-date.

#7: You’re Getting Low-Quality Traffic

You might think that getting lots of traffic is a good thing but that only applies when it’s high-quality traffic. If you have incoming spam links, they can hurt you instead of helping you.

To get rid of low-quality traffic, use a tool like Finteza. It will analyze your traffic and help you identify sources that might be hurting you with Google, including bots. Once you indetify what those sources are, you can work to remove them.

Improving Google rank is a priority for most companies. Using the information that we’ve provided here you can move up on Google’s SERP and get the organic traffic you deserve.