17 Common SEO Errors That Can Hurt Your Organic Rankings [Fix Them]

Fixing SEO errors or website errors is the best strategy to improve user experience, click-through rates, and search engine ranking.

No matter how good optimize your website or blog is, you face some common SEO errors once in a while.

Other people are at: Top 5 Questions To Ask Before Hiring An SEO Agency

SEO errors are bad for your organic growth. A site or page with SEO errors can lose search ranking.

Ignoring SEO errors will cause you a loss of organic traffic and authority.

It is necessary to understand these errors and fix them quickly.

So, without wasting any time here, I share the list of most common SEO errors that you must fix for a better ranking.

Accessibility and Indexing related issues:

Duplicated content:

Duplicate content, copy content, and plagiarism are some of the major issues why Google devalues many sites in search ranking.

There are chances that two or more pages on your website display similar information or an exact copy.

This makes it hard for search engines to find and index the most helpful page.

Google bots make the site suffer from identical content.

Copy content pages lose link power, and social shares are divided into multiple pages.

There are many ways to fix duplicate content, but the most effective is to use a canonical tag.

Using the canonical tag, you will tell search engines about the preferred page.

Noindex tag:

Bloggers or webmasters use the Noindex tag to tell search engines which pages they should not index.

If you use the noindex tag on a useful page, it will not index in search results.

To ensure that you should now keep track of noindex pages using excel sheet or Google drive page.

iFrames:

An iFrame is an HTML file within another HTML file.

The content within iFrame is invisible to search engines. Most of the time, iFrames lead the user to low-quality pages with thin content.

Iframes also take a lot of time to load and thus not good for your website speed.

Word Count:

You cannot explain the topic is too short words. Google considers too short content as low value or thin content.

Word count is not a ranking factor. But without explaining the topic, you cannot serve your audience in the best way possible.

Make sure that the content you create is thorough, robust, and actionable.
The era of Flash sites has gone.

The problem with too short content is that you get less chance to use keywords, LSI, and user queries.

Flash:

Even the Flash software discontinued on 31st December 2020.

Browsers are also not supporting flash content anymore.

Accelerated Mobile Pages will make your website load faster.

Search engines cannot fully understand the content within Flash. So, the best is to get rid of Flash content.

Without the mobile-optimized site, you cannot rank your content.
Outdated tags is a common SEO error.

AMP:

To ensure that your website or blog runs smoothly, you must fix this error.
Not all the CSS and Javascript codes are compatible with AMP.

You must optimize your website with AMP plugins for mobile devices.

Outdated Tags:

Image Credit HTTP status code errors come from the server.

Without fixing them, you cannot make your site user-friendly.

CSS and Javascript errors:

It is necessary to fix CSS and Javascript errors.

HTTP Status Code:

A lot of SEO tools are available to help you in finding such errors.

HTTPS and Server errors:
Mixed content is a major issue with the sites that have changed their HTTP status to HTTPS.

Server Status Code 4xx Errors:

Too many 4xx errors will bring negative Pagerank. Sites with 4xx errors are usually less visited by Google Bots.

It is necessary to fix the mixed content issue.

Server Status Code 5xx Errors:

5xx Errors display that server is causing problems. You must fix it to improve Pagerank.

Ensure that your domain name for SSL certificate registration matches the domain name you see in the address bar.

Mixed Content:

An orphaned page is a page without any internal link to it.

Google chrome also does not load mixed content properly.

Most of the time, orphan pages are not indexed in Google.
Do not link to redirected pages.

The site or page that has both HTTP and HTTPS content are prone to hacking.

Doorway pages are the pages that rank for some keyword but redirect the user to another page.
Links from low-quality sites or sites with a bad reputation can ruin your Pagerank.

Insecure Password code:

<input type="password"> is known as the insecure password input. You must fix this issue.

Match Names:

Links and Redirects:

Orphaned Pages:

Google bots can crawl pages with links quite easily as compared to orphaned pages.

Redirected Pages:

Making doorway pages invite doorway pages SEO penalty.

Bad Links:

To get rid of this issue, you must use Google's disavow form.

• Conflicting hreflang URLs
• rel=canonical URLs
• No Self-referencing hreflang URLs

PageSpeed:

Leverage Browser Caching:

Using browser caching will help you load certain content first before loading the complete page.

These are a few of the most common SEO errors that can cause you to lose traffic and search ranking. Fix these errors to improve click-through rate and chances to rank higher in SERP.

Compression:

Compression helps you save many bytes size data. You can compress CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files.

Hreflang Attributes:

Webmasters use Hreflang attributes to tell the Google language of the page. There are some Hreflang errors that you must fix.

Hreflang Page Source Conflicts:

You will find the following issues:

Invalid Hreflang Values:

Ensure that you are using the right language with the correct country code.

Conclusion:

Optimizing a website is your job.

If you still have any question, feel free to ask me.

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