What Ranks Negatively With The Search Engines

Below are some of the top factors that will have an adverse impact on your Webpage rankings...

Crawlers can not View Your Webpages

If your webpages are constantly going offline or subject to a lot of server downtime - when the server where your website is stored on keeps getting shut down for maintainance work - this will have a negative impact on your search rankings. These problems are more found with developing countries that might suffer from these issues. If Google believes that users when they come to your website will have a negative experience, like no website showing up!, they are not likely to rank that website highly.

Duplicate Content

Search Engines want to deliver exciting, unique and beneficial content to their users, because thats what users want. After searching for a term in Google, you'd be pretty unsatisfied if all the search results pointed to the same article, albeit on different sites. Which is why the search engines favour unique content and also websites that have large amounts of content as these are seen most beneficial to users and are the traits of a good-quality website.

Linking to Spam or Low-Quality Websites

If your website has a lot of links that send users to low-quality websites or to spam sites, this sheds doubt on the quality of your own site, in the eyes of the search engines at least. It means your not holding value for visitors that come to your site, and sites like Google that do hold value for their consumers, wouldn't want to touch you with a stick!

What complicates this issue, however, is when you place a link to what you recognise as a decent website, and somewhere along the line, the domain name expires and is bought by someone who might use the website for spam or some other unscrupulous purpose.

Link Selling and other Link Schemes

Search Engines look unfavourably at websites that try and manipulate search results by selling links on their websites. Something like, "Pay me $15 and I'll put your link on my website". As well as other shady schemes such as discreetly hiding links, or distributing code that you can place on your website with links hidden in them.

Ineffective use of Title Tag

The title tage, which you can read more about here: What Ranks Well With the Search Engines, can be an important and valuable tool for search engines to know what your website is about and if it relevant to a user's query. Incorrect use of it or if you haven't optimised it correctly for your site, is not only a lost opportunity, but can also be seen as a negative ranking factor.

As you might well of realised, all of these negative ranking factors relate to user experience. That is to say, if you have made your website to deliver a positive and beneficial user experience to your website guests, it is the safest way to rank well with the search engines. And as a positive side-effect it helps you to enhance the user experience to all those that visit your website. Sites with all these negative factors might still rank well with Google, probably because they might accrued thousands of backlinks, but as Google and the other search engines optimize their own search algorithms, the tendecy is always towards fresh, human-orientated, original and beneficial content that offers a positive user experience.