I usually share tips
and strategies with you about how to increase your websites ranking in the
search results.
Gonna do the exact
opposite today (did you ever have Opposite
Day in school when you were a kid? wear your clothed inside out or
backwards? maybe it was just a Alvin , Tx
Anyway…I want to tell
you things Google hates that can hurt your website’s
ranking…so you make sure you DO NOT do it.
Most of these are
fairly easy fixes.
And none of these if
just slightly bad will totally override everything else. But you should
try your best to not shoot yourself in the foot with something that you can
easily remedy.
Here are 4 things Google
hates:
Long Domain Names with
Dashes
If you had a domain,
ScubaGear.com, this tends to rank better in search results than something like
Buy-Cheap-Scuba-Gear.com.
Now again, the domain length isn’t the total culprit. There are of a lot of reasons for this. For example, ScubaGear.com is probably a much older domain name. It’s probably also been around for 10 years or more, and has a lot of back links going to it.
Buy-Cheap-Scuba-Gear.com looks
kinda spammy. Its just not something that is going to earn a lot of links.
Dashes are another
example of things Google hates.
The more hyphens a domain name has, that is actually another negative
correlation factor. That doesn’t mean you can’t use long domain names..just
means that it may not do as well.
Response Time
There is a lot of
debate in the SEO world if slower web pages, slower servers cause lower
rankings. I don’t have any hard data on it, so I don’t really
have a definite answer. But we see that slower loading pages tend to rank a
little lower than others….so I feel this is one of those things Google hates.
We all know that
faster websites, faster response times present a better user experience. If you
have a slow site, it is definitely worth looking into. There are several
services that will host your sites images on the cloud (CloudFlare has a free version), which will
speed up your site’s load time.
You can test your
site’s load time at http://tools.pingdom.com/.
AdSense
This is a surprising
one. Many people think that if you use Google services, such as installing
Google Analytics on your site or putting AdSense on your site, that Google
tends to favor those websites and that you’ll rank higher.
Actually..the exact
opposite is true…its another one of those things Google hates.
So let’s say that
website A has several AdSense ad areas (and you’ve seen these pages – just
filled with AdSense). It will tend to not rank as well as pages with
fewer AdSense slots.
Another thing is the
volume. So, not only the amount of slots you have, but also the space on
your website that uses AdSense, will negatively affect your rankings.
Again, doesn’t
necessarily cause it, but that’s what data shows.
Just think about it
from a users viewpoint…which page would you rather link to? A page with a
disproportionate amount of Adsense…or a page with content.
Percent of Followed
Linking Pages
The most surprising
result of this year’s correlation data was the percent of followed linking
pages. This requires a little bit of explanation.
This means that if all
your links pointing towards your domain are followed, we tend to see those
sites ranking a little lower. That doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense off
the get-go. You’d think if all your links were followed, you’d just be great in
rankings.
But think of domain
diversity. Sites that rank well tend to have a lot of sites linking to them.
They have sites like Wikipedia that have no followed links, citations no
followed links.
In general, they have
a diverse link profile, whereas spammier sites, smaller sites, newer sites,
they are going after those links. They have to work very hard for each one of
them, and their diversity is not as great.
This just confirms
what I did when I created Instant
Linkerati. We intentionally build No Follow links because that is
what you find in a natural linking profile. Cause I knew that …its another
one of those things Google hates. 
Final thoughts…
As far as best
practices go, I like to work under the premise of what would I do if there was
no Google, no search engines, or rankings. AS SEO’s, what would you or I do to
get people to visit, like and stay on our site? The answer is that we would
provide a great user experience and develop killer content that our visitors
enjoy.
You can get more
detail on these and otherranking factors (and more things Google hates) withSEOmoz’s ranking factor report.
You can also get a free 14-Day trial of InstantLinkerati and see why its the Ferrari of all
other link building services.
