Hello, I am Mohit and I’ve been in the digital marketing game for a while now, Amm… almost 5 years, and like many others, I’ve made my fair share of SEO blunders along the way.
Initially, I thought I had SEO all figured out. However, with each mistake, I gained a deeper understanding of the complexities of SEO.
Today, I want to share some of the most common SEO mistakes that I have made in the past and realized when it was too late! Yes, I corrected these mistakes, but after a huge loss. Whether you are a Professional SEO or new to the SEO game, I can guarantee that my insights will definitely help you learn something new from this post.
YES! These insights can save you from the downfall of your blog—mainly from Google Core Updates.
So, let’s learn and safeguard our blog for the future.
Based on my research, I have divided these mistakes into 3 major categories: Content, Tech SEO, and off-page errors.
- Thin, Duplicate Content
- Tech SEO Errors
- Off-Page SEO Errors
I found that the combination of any two categories can impact website ranking, especially on Google SERPs.
Common SEO Mistakes
Most of the time, search engines ignore these errors on our blog, but if you do not focus on correcting them, then this can lead to a major drop in traffic, and I am talking about content-related errors.
A. Thin, Duplicate Content
Other SEOs explain thin content as “zero-value content” produced only to game search engines, but what I know about thin content is that it “fails to deliver real value to the reader.”
It’s not just about word count but whether the content truly answers the searcher’s query. Understanding the user’s query, also known as search intent, is crucial in the operation of search engines.
If you have thin content on your blog, it’s 100% possible that it can impact your website’s authority and reputation, leading to major drops in your rankings in search engines.
1. Duplicate content
If you are copying and pasting existing content from your previously published post to a new post can lead to duplicate content. Technically, “content that is copied entirely from another page, whether from the same blog or a different site, is considered duplicate content.”
Duplicate content on a website or blog can confuse search engines when determining which version of your content is more relevant to show or rank on their SERP results. This can also increase your crawl budget. so try to make things simple.
Be aware of Duplicate content issues, and always check for it once every six months. Also, tell your writers about the error.
Here’s what I’ve noticed: most SEOs and bloggers get trapped in duplicate content issues when they follow the same blog structure to remain consistent. This is most common on e-commerce websites, where every product page follows the same content structure or template.
What surprised me is that even niche blogs can be victims of this if we use the same format for every post.
I also made the same mistake: I added duplicate content from previous blog posts to maintain the blog post’s structure, which led to a big disaster.
How to Fix Duplicate Content Issues
What I did was; I used a free tool called Siteliner.com, which scans your website and identifies duplicate content on each post. You can use this tool—it’s completely free—and it shows you which pages have duplicate content so you can design your “Content Correction Campaign” accordingly.
Here are my blog scores on the platform, showing how often I made this error in my posts. Even though I personally wrote all these articles, I wasn’t aware that following the same structure could lead to duplicate content issues in the future.
2. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is when you try to use your primary keyword multiple times on the blog post unnecessary to game search algorithms, but after these google update keyword stuffed websites are penalized by google, this leads to 90% of the organic traffic loss of the blog and websites.
In the case of keyword stuffing, search engines like Google can penalize your blog or website and also remove your web pages from their SERP Results & in some cases it can also lead to site wide impact.
Keyword stuffing is not a good practice, so I recommend you remove unnecessary keywords from your content. This can help you safeguard your website from Google penalty updates.
Google thinks of keyword stuffing as an attempt to manipulate its search algorithm.
3. Low-Quality Ads, Affiliate Page
Pages that are filled with affiliate links solely created to earn affiliate commissions without providing the actual solution to the query are considered low-quality affiliate pages.
Google has its spam policies where this issue is listed by their officials.
Now, you might be thinking that Affiliate marketing is one of the most profitable ways of making money online with a blog. Then how can Google penalize these types of blogs?
Yes, you are right! Affiliate marketing is not bad; what is bad is how you are doing it. If you have a blog page promoting a product and it doesn’t have any value, then it can lead to a low engagement rate, and then Google will downgrade your rankings.
The same rule applies to blogs filled with ads. Have you ever been bombarded with ads on a website or blog? For me, it’s especially when I visit Forbes and the same kind of big publications. Most of us can relate to this experience, and it’s not a pleasant one. The frustration of navigating through a sea of ads can lead to a low dwell time, and such blogs and websites are considered low quality.
Although Forbes is there because of its brand value and website authority, for small blogs it’s not advisable to have the same amount of ads.
So, I recommend that you reduce the number of affiliate links on blog posts and also try to reduce the quantity of ads on your blog so that you can’t face ranking drops from Google.
These are the most common mistakes I’ve made with my content in the past, and I hope this helps you understand why it’s important to review your pages for these errors.
B. Tech SEO Errors
1. Page speed
How quickly your webpage’s content loads, or how long it takes to load completely, is measured in seconds and is known as page speed/loading speed.
A web page which loads under 3 seconds is considered as excellent load speed.
Page speed is one of the ranking factors for every search engine along with Google because a good loading website can have a good UX user experience because the visitor doesn’t have to wait long to get their results.
I overlooked this issue, which resulted in low engagement rates and people leaving my website before it fully loaded.
Improving your site’s speed can significantly boost engagement rates, as a fast website ensures users can access content quickly.
2. Mobile Friendly Optimizations
Mobile optimization is one of the most crucial tasks to perform before making your blog live. Yes, make sure to test it for mobiles.
Most searches are done by mobile users, and we bloggers sometimes forget that, so optimizing your blog and website for mobile users should be your first priority.
Try to make a dynamic and responsive website that can easily load on any device.
Google launched a plugin for WordPress users to make their websites mobile-friendly. The plugin’s name is AMP by Google, and it serves your website amazingly on mobile devices.
I also use this plugin on my WordPress blogs, and I am really happy with its performance. It is free to use and easy to install on a WordPress website, with no complicated settings.
So if you want to make your web page accessible by mobile device, then you can use this plugin.
3. Redirects/404 errors
Redirects in SEO are the practice of sending users/visitors from one URL to another. Yes, Redirection is the most important technique for maintaining a website, but sometimes, having too many redirects and 404 errors can harm your website.
404 errors, or “page not found,” are the most common. You may also have seen these errors when you get an empty URL for a website. This means the browser sent a request to the web server, but the web server didn’t find that file on the database, and it returned a 404 error.
In simple terms, if pages are deleted from your website, try to 301 redirect them to your working page or home page.
Again, make sure to have a limited number of redirects because too many redirects can affect your rankings and User experience.
C. OFF-Page Errors
Off-page SEO is crucial to making your blog successful. It will determine how fast you’ll grow. So, let’s look at some off-page SEO errors that can impact our rankings.
1. Bad Backlinks
Yes, bad backlinks can impact your website’s authority in the long run, so try to clean your backlink profile.
You can use tools like Semrush to do that. With its free plan, you can get a list of websites linking to you. You can review these websites and scan them to see whether they are genuine blogs or websites. If you find anything wrong, try to disavow those websites and submit your disavow file to Google.
Having a lot of bad backlinks can impact your ranking or even lead to a permanent penalty by Google.
So, go through your link profile with tools like Semrush and clean your backlink profile once a year.
2. Excessive Profile Mentions
Profile Mention, a term commonly used in SEO, refers to the recognition or reference a brand receives on social media or other online platforms, without a direct link to their website.
This can help you increase your brand value and credibility.
But doing that excessively is bad. It is one of the most common off-page SEO mistakes made by new bloggers, and it can impact your whole website.
Instead of building an audience on some platforms, new bloggers try to create profiles on every social or other platform with their website link and hope that making a large number of these links can help them increase their brand awareness.
But that’s not the case. It’s about the number of visitors, searching for your brand. That can help you to rank higher than making simple profiles.
so focus on creating good content on social media to get branded traffic instead of creating profiles.
3. Bad Anchor Text Backlinks
Backlinks are one of the most crucial factors when building a blog that helps to get good ranking and build website authority and trust in search engines.
But when making these backlinks we get stuck. Creating backlinks for new websites is the hardest part of blogging or growing a website.
Getting a perfect backlink requires hard work, money, and time.
But when creating, we forgot about anchor texts. The most common practice of getting backlinks is guest posting.
So, I recommend following these rules for getting a backlink for your blog that can help you rank.
- Blogs should be closely related to your niche.
- Anchor text should match the intent of the target URL.
- Visit the website before linking.
- Use Moz spam score. It’s not a Google term, but it can help you identify whether a website is related to spam practices.
By following these steps I can guarantee you that you are going to win in the blogging game both for short and long term goals.
My conclusions: (what’s my Plan?)
You now have a good understanding of what to consider to avoid these mistakes. I know some of these may sound very silly, but most of us make these mistakes accidentally, so try to safeguard your blogs from today.
My plan is to go through all the posts and make these changes to each one. There are common SEO mistakes, and there are many reasons why our blogs get hit by Google updates. I have done nine months of research to find some of the points that can impact rankings.
In this research, I found 70+ data points that could be a reason why I was impacted by these updates.
One reason is that I started working for clients for a while and had less time for my blog, so I haven’t updated old content in a while. This could be one of the reasons.
There is a huge list, but for now, you should focus on these mistakes and try to correct them ASAP.
Thanks for reading and if you found this post informatinal then please comment and share it wiht your blogger friends if they are facing the same problems.
With regards, Mohit!
Steer clear of these SEO pitfalls! thannks for sharing these tips.