Search Engine Negative Ranking Factors

Check your website for these factors:

1. Keyword Spamming

Stuffing, stacking or overusing key terms in an attempt to appear relevant for terms/phrases may negatively affect rankings.

2. Delivery Disparities

One of the most penalized tactics used both by savvy, malicious optimizers and unaware web coders is separation of content delivery. This can be done by user-agent, IP address, geography or other factors and involved delivering one set of content to one user and another to others. If others includes search engines and this process is detected, it may results in harsh bans or devaluations in the results.

3. Duplicate Content

Prevalent on the web as a source of lower rankings, duplicating a large portion of a web site or page's content onto another page/site can be harmful to one or both sources. Whether this duplication is in violation of intent or copyright has little to do with how search engines evaluate and list duplicate content.

4. Hosting the Same Content Issues

A highly dangerous and frequent problem with large website in particular, canonical issues stem from duplicates of data existing on multiple URLs, typically all controlled by the same entity. For example: url.com and www.url.com and www.url.com/index.html all hosting the same content, receiving multiple links to each and being listed separately in search listings may negatively affect the rankings of the intended single page of content.

5. Link Spamming

Whether via automated blog or guestbook spamming, hex code submissions to site searches or other, less nefarious methods, any links garnered via automated or unnatural systems or perceived to be obtained thusly by search engines may hurt ranking abilities of websites or individual pages.

6. Link to Unrelated Sites

The outbound links on a website could indicate a low quality document, or worse, participation in manipulation or link schemes. Search engines have been known to harshly penalize these tactics - even banning some sites on a first offense.