In the previous article on 7 Things That Hurt Your SEO Rankings and How to Fix Them[1], we found how a drop in SEO rankings can be one of the worst things that can happen to a website.
A bad SEO entails practices that are outside the boundaries of Google webmaster guidelines[2] and it affects the optimization of your website for search engines.
There are many techniques that can hurt your SEO rankings if implemented. Serpstat, in 2017, found about 300 million errors when they indexed 175 million pages with an SEO audit tool. These errors stemmed from not doing SEO the right way and while we have discussed 7 of these errors, here are more things that could hurt your rankings and how you can fix them.
1. Accessibility and indexation
The accessibility and indexation of your site contribute greatly to how your website pages can be seen on search engines. Some of the categories to consider include:
Canonical Tag: duplicate content[3] makes it difficult for search engines to decide on a page to show users, which could affect the visibility of either page. If you will be implementing a rel=canonical tag[4], ensure it is done correctly, to avoid losing your website ranking. Situations, where you may implement wrongly, may include:
- Incorrectly installing a code, by inserting it in <body>, instead of the <head> section
- Implementing a rel=canonical to a 404 page
- Launching without checking the code, which triggers search engines to de-index.
Noindex Tag: if you do no longer need a noindex tag[5] on a webpage, ensure you remove it as