Most Common SEO Problems
For the past many months, I’ve been concerned as a director for a really gifted agency known as The Search Initiative (TSI).
The reason I teamed up with these guys was terribly straightforward.
These guys were testers. Like me, they solely accept expertise, data, and take a look at results for his or her ranking ways.
It was a match created in heaven.
Since then, we’ve had the pleasure of onboarding over fifty new shoppers. several of those new partners have had seen immense growth, others have had penalties removed, and every one has clear roadmaps on a way to grow in the future.
I needed to share with you the highest ten issues we have a tendency to generally encounter once onboarding new shoppers. I hope that by sharing with you a number of these common mistakes, that you simply will use this information to your advantage and build some serious enhancements to your rankings.
1.Keyword Cannibalization
This is an astonishingly common issue for many we tend topsites that we encounter. Despite the big quantity of resources online to assist with cannibalization, you'd be shocked what percentage folks still suffer from it.
Never detected it?
Quite merely, it’s after you have multiple pages on your website competitive for identical keywords.
And guess what? Google doesn’t am passionate about it.
The first step is to be told to diagnose the perpetrator pages, as a result of if you can not realize cannibalization – however, are you able to fix what you can’t see?
At The Search Initiative, we've many ways that to seek out cannibalization however here’s the simplest and best.
Use Keyword trailing Tools
One of the advantages a shopper gets from operating with TSI is that we tend to track keywords up to double daily with Agency Analytics, one among our partners.
The tool includes a summary of the site’s overall keyword performance, like below:
aside from showing us an overview of how this client has performed over the past 7 days, we can use this to track each keyword’s performance independently too:
In this photo, you might notice that there had been a jump from the 3rd page to the 1st page for their target term after implementing some of our onsite advice. However, more importantly, you will also be able to see that the Google URL had started flipping between their category page and their homepage.
This is an obvious sign of cannibalization and once noticed we jumped into action to fix the problem.
I’ll do an article on this in the future because there’s much more to be said about it.
2. Over-Optimized Anchor Text
There was a significant update in October 2016 as Penguin 4.0 rolled out.
Penguin 4.0 was an update that changed how Google perceives and interacts with links. I even wrote an article for Ahrefs covering how it affected anchor text optimization.
As part of our auditing process for each new client, we analyze your existing anchor text and break the types down into the below values:
- Branded – an anchor text that includes your brand name or a slight variation, for example: ‘thesearchinitiative’, ‘visit the search initiative’, or ‘TSI’.
- Generic – an anchor that uses a generic term but does not include branding, for example‘here’, ‘read more’, or ‘visit site’.
- Image – a link that has no anchor is generally shown as a blank in AHREFS export feature. Other clues might be file extensions in the alt attribute ‘jpg’ is probably an image.
- Miscellaneous – an anchor that does not qualify as generic, but is otherwise unrelated to the website. Forum and comment spam often includes anchors such as ‘Steve’, ‘Stuart’, or ‘Stan’.
- Low Quality – an anchor that is more than 100 characters is generally an irrelevant anchor unless it’s a long URL. Another low-quality anchor is a foreign language and symbols.
- Targeted – an anchor that includes the exact or partial term you are trying to rank for, effective to gain rankings but higher risk for tripping a Penguin filter against your site.
- Topical – an anchor that is on topic, but does not include your targeted term. For example, an affiliate site reviewing ‘best running shoes’ might include topical anchors such as: ‘healthy workout’, ‘burn lots of calories’, or ‘high impact sport’.
- URL – this is arguably the most obvious one, but anchors that are naked URLs such as ‘example.com’ and ‘http://example.com’ would count as URL.
Here’s an example of a client that recently joined and has an issue with anchor text. The labels match the descriptions above:
In this example, the website in question has chosen to use lots of targeted anchors but has also picked up lots of low-quality anchors along the way. The solution was to increase the amount of topical, branded, and generic anchors so he could meet the anchor requirements as determined by the niche average (read more).
By increasing the volumes of those anchors, the client regained organic traffic loss and is now set up to survive future updates.
It’s important to note that most people use low-quality pillow links and press releases to redistribute their anchors.
There are indeed some issues with this that are covered in the next two points.
3. Poor Linking Strategy
Up until this point, 3 of the top 4 issues have been related to onsite. While Issue #5 is indeed another offsite link building issue, it’s important to recognize the connection.
When a website has fixed its technical issues, pumped out valuable content, and improved user performance metrics – link building becomes a lot easier.
Rather than needing 100’s of links to rank a site, you can achieve a lot more with less. Since link building and onsite both cost money – you may be wondering why not just spend money on links?
The answer is simple…
Google has introduced many link building filters to thwart your efforts, therefore, the more links you build the more likely you are to be caught. By delivering the better content you will not only improve your conversion rates, but you will make it easier to rank higher, permanently.
Check out one of our older clients who has been relaxing on page 1 for 2 years comfortably:
So, the question is, what makes a link strategy good?
The first thing is to avoid over-optimizing your anchor text because this is eventually going to cause a penalty. Choose to use topical terms and branded anchors to hit your pages instead.
The second thing is to target other pages than your main core pages. If you have created a blog post that is valuable and internally links to one of your core pages, throw some links at that page too. Avoid becoming the Black Sheep.
Not only will this help prevent overcooking your page, it’s going to help you rank for long tail keywords that you didn’t claim before.
The reason your competition doesn’t do this is because they fail to focus on any pages other than their money pages.
Big mistake.
4. Low-Quality Affiliate Content
This should go without saying, but if your content is not good then you don’t deserve to rank. Period.
However, what most affiliate sites are guilty of is not mopping up all the juicy long tail keywords that are easy to rank for and provide noticeable traffic. It’s not that they don’t want to rank for those keywords, it’s just that they don’t know how.
We want to share a couple images with you that show just how powerful content can be, and if you don’t value your content – what can happen:
This client has recently joined us and suspected a penalty, and at first glance, there’s a dip in visibility, but nothing that seems too unusual. Until you zoom into the top 10 positions:
What initially looks like a slight dip is really a huge drop in rankings, and this person has suffered from decreased traffic for about 8 months.
The culprit? Content.
This is no fault of their own, but somebody has scraped all their website and created duplicate content across the web. We’re currently working to re-write their whole website’s content, file DMCA requests and fix holes in their linking strategy. We anticipate a return in rankings within the next 3 months.
While this highlights the power of content in Google’s algorithm, this is slightly different from what I am describing with low-quality affiliate content. The main culprit we see is when every page has an affiliate link and there’s no actual user value.
It’s possible to rank this way, but there are some drawbacks.
Let’s look at User Performance Metrics and how this can help guide our content strategy.
5.Titles & Meta Descriptions
This is like keyword cannibalization in that it’s surprising how many websites still have issues with it. This is something I would expect most people to be getting right by now since there are literally millions of pages on the topic:
6. Internal Redirects
This is one of the most common issues that websites face. A large volume of 3XX Redirects on your website seems fine to most – if it’s a 301. However, this isn’t strictly true and here’s why:
A 301 redirect is designed for when a user requests a page that is no longer available and has been permanently moved. This is something that happens a lot across the internet. The server after a moment of latency returns a different URL and the page loads as usual.
The issue with the above is the term latency and it’s something most webmasters ignore. The physical distance between a user and your server means that even a tiny bit of header information takes time to send and receive.
If you are looking to improve your user experience, then you should make your website as fast as possible and therefore remove all 301s when not absolutely needed. This will be better for your user and help authority flow within the website unhindered.
However, what’s the difference between a 301 and a 302 redirect?
Whilst 301 redirect points towards a permanent move from one location to another, a 302 is a temporary move. From Googlebot’s perspective, this means that:
- 301 Redirects should index the new URL, rather than the previous URL
- 302 Redirects should index the previous URL, ignore the new URL
Google has claimed to handle both the same but it doesn’t make sense that they would do this. Both status codes have different purposes and should be treated differently.
Make sure you’re using the right redirect on your website.
7. Low-Quality Pillow Links
Pillow links are used to diversify your anchor text ratios – in the audio industry, this would be comparable with signal-to-noise ratio. When you buy a microphone, you want low noise and high signal – but this is the complete opposite to SEO link profiles.
If your link profile has a high signal and low noise, it’s going to be easy for Google to analyze your website’s links and pick up unnatural trends with their machine learning. You could consider pillow links to be dithering for the audiophiles out there; you add noise to the signal to improve the quality.
Here’s a shocking figure for you from a recent client who had built 100s of pillow links attempting to dilute a high target anchor text distribution:
Despite the client having built 315 pillow links in the past 12 months, only 25 of these links were indexed. This means that despite all the time and money spent, it was providing almost no value.
The solution is to use indexing tools that encourage Googlebot to index your pillow links… or just build all quality links and you won’t have this problem.
For indexing, we use our own proprietary tool but there are some online services that can do this for a fee.
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