Top 5 SEO Mistakes To Avoid Google Penalty

Do you often wonder why your eCommerce website ranking does not improve despite your best efforts? Well, you are not alone. Several website owners face this challenge even after putting in a lot of energy, time, and money to optimize their eCommerce website. 

A big reason for the poor ranking is a penalty from Google. Apart from the lower ranking, the penalty can cause a decline in your organic traffic, which may affect your business and branding. 

So here are 5 SEO mistakes you must stop making to avoid a Google penalty:

1. Keyword stuffing

Avoiding keyword stuffing is one of the first tips any SEO expert working in a reputed eCommerce agency will give you. Google considers this a significant offense and has been actively penalizing websites that have followed this practice for over a decade. Google’s BERT algorithm helps it to detect content that does not flow naturally. Therefore refrain from making this mistake and keep the keyword density to about 2-3%.

2. Using duplicate content

The search engine giant takes this offense very seriously and prevents indexing the pages that have duplicated or plagiarized content. Hence such sites will not even show up in the search results. It also penalizes you if you copy-paste your content in different places. As a general rule of the thumb, always ensure that the content your put on your website is fresh and unique.

3. Ignoring user experience

Google gives a lot of importance to user experience (UX). So if your website does not meet the criteria laid down by it for acceptable UX, it will never rank high. Some of the factors that you must address are:

• Speed- Google calculates the speed with which a website loads as users do not like waiting for a long time. Thus take measures to improve the speed of your website to avoid low rankings.
• Mobile support- As the number of mobile users is continuously rising, Google is naturally favoring sites that have mobile-friendly content. Hence optimize your site for mobile users to boost your rankings.
• Safety- If Google detects viruses, malware, or other potentially dangerous materials, it may block it altogether or display a warning message. So always ensure that your website is safe.
• Flash- Avoid the use of Adobe Flash as the search engine cannot scan the text effectively. Use newer SEO friendly technologies like HTML5 or CSS3 for better results.

• Building spammy links

This is another mistake looked down by Google as it considers this as an unnatural SEO technique. Below are some of the practices you must stop using to avoid penalties:

• Purchasing links from questionable sources
• Participating in link exchanges or link farms
• Paying bloggers to insert links on their websites
• Spamming links on online communities and forums

• Incorrect formatting

Google pays attention to quality, style, and editing while differentiating between low and high-quality websites. To help your website rank higher, make sure that you do not use more than 1 occurrence of the H1 tag. Also use H2, H3 headings along with italics and bold. This helps Google crawler to interpret and rank the website better.

Conclusion

Google hands out thousands of penalties every month. However, many can be easily avoided by following certain best practices. Therefore develop a basic comprehension of the rules and watch your website climb the rankings.