Things Google’s Algorithm Hates
- Buying Links
You may know people who have bought links or sell links to help your search rankings improve. This is something Google will penalize you for if they catch you. Having legitimate links is one thing, but buying links that end up in the footer of some random site that have the anchor text you want to rank for draws a suspicious eye. Keep it legit.
- Ads All Over Your Site
Google understands having ads on a site. You may need it to supplement your income or help keep your site up and running. This is all well and good; however, if you provide users with a less than desirable experience because they can’t tell the different between ads and real content, you’re going to have a problem. This is against Google’s best practices and your rankings will take a turn for the worse.
- Hidden Text
Google’s robot that crawls sites is always on the lookout for text. It will index, archive and use this text. What Google does not like is when you give text to its robot that the average user cannot see. This is manipulative and Google will penalize you for it. This is done by either having white text on a white background or by manipulating page code to cater to the Google robot only.
- Thin Content
Some people that attempt to improve rankings try to create pages for every keyword they wish to rank for. Unfortunately their efforts fall short on creating valuable content for the user on each of those pages. Google knows you are trying to rank better by having the pages index and will not reward you for shorting the user on content they want to see.
- Duplicate Content
Google has a massive database of content. As such, they are not looking for the same thing over and over again. They only need one of each website. If the robot finds the same content on multiple websites, it’s going to pay little, if any attention to it after the first instance. Make sure all the content on your website is unique.
- Integration of Flash
Since the Google robot loves to find content in the form of text, you can imagine its disappointment when it gets to your flash site. Since the robot is not very good and indexing content from Flash based sites, you will not see your content (no matter how unique or valuable) get indexed because Google can’t read it.
- Slow Loading Sites
If your site is slow to load, Google will not grant you good rankings. The Googlebot knows how fast a site should load and it will make note of slow sites that it find. Why, you ask? Because Google knows that its users like sites that load quickly and efficiently and they wouldn’t be the best search engine if they didn’t give their users what they wanted. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot, make your website faster if it needs to be.
