Twelve Reasons Google Penalizes Your Website and Drops Your Rankings

With Google’s frequent algorithm changes; it pays to constantly fine-tune your website’s SEO. More than 300 elements determine where Google will rank your site; here are twelve factors that may send your site to the penalty box with a fatal drop in ranking:

1. Missing a sitemap.xml page

2. Excessive use of the H1 tag (use it just once per page)

3. Duplicate content of body copy and meta description tags on each page

4. Slow download time of images

5. Keyword-stuffing and over-optimization of copy

6. Excessive use of reciprocal links (keep it at two per page)

7. Exact-match keyword domain (keywords that make-up the domain name)

8. Links to websites of different business categories

9. Incorrect robots.txt or 301 Redirects

10. Links to suspicious and spammy sites

11. Broken links (download Xenu’s Link Sleuth program)

12. Over-use of anchor text, repeating the same keyword phrase

Even professionally-managed SEO programs can experience the negative effects of a Google algorithm change. Good SEO managers know how to counter and recover from the newest changes to regain good positions.