#1 Duplicate Content is the Enemy
Want to make a search engine forget your website?
Copy content on your pages and offer nothing new or of value. Mission accomplished.
If you want to get found, each page should be unique. If you have pages that require duplication of content – mark up those pages as “no index, no follow” in your robots.txt and ensure their presence does not affect your SEO ranking negatively.
#2 Keyword Stuffing
Not only is keyword stuffing guaranteed to make the search engines, not like your page, but it will also thoroughly annoy your visitors. Search engines don’t like it because it appears your page is trying to game the algorithms and visitors find it boring.
Having your target keyword in your title, opening paragraph and in the next as it would naturally occur is usually right on track for good SEO.
#3 Low-Quality Guest Posts Linking to Your Site
Guest Posting is seen as a great way to get backlinks linking to your site. And it is.
There are numerous aspects of guest posting that can hurt your organic rankings. Among them: The guest post site needs to be related to the site you are linking to and needs to be a high-quality website. Joining mass posting sites or free linking sites that accept any quality of post generally do not even get indexed by Google and some are outright blacklisted
#4 Guests Posts Can Hurt You
Inviting people to contribute as authors on your site is great as long as the content published matches your genre. If you have a site relating to dog grooming and dog care and you start publishing content about credit card rates or home warranties – it’s going to hurt your ranking.
The publishing of fresh content regularly is great for SEO but it must be original and match the rest of your website or it’s not such a great idea.
#5 Poor Web Design Can Hurt Your Rankings
Back in the early days of web design, it was a common practice to cloak or hide text or the real destination of a link. Another common tactic involved putting keyword phrases at the bottom of the page in the same color as the background so they weren’t readily visible to viewers but “seen” by search engines.
In the present, this is a ranking killer. The solution? Give your site visitors a single version of your page that is responsive and displays similarly on all screens with no hidden text or redirects.
#6 Too Many Ads Above the Fold
Go easy on the ads -especially above the fold. As part of the page layout algorithm, Google will punish your site if you have too many ads appearing above the fold (the part of the website that displays first before you have to scroll to see more).
One sign you have too many ads is a sudden drop in traffic.
#7 Too Many Outgoing Links
Check that your outgoing links have “nofollow” tags when appropriate. When you have a ton of outgoing links, it gives search engines that your site might be a link farm or a paid directory.
It is a good idea to ‘nofollow’ any links in ads, comments, and websites that you don’t trust fully.