![\"16](\"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/16-Causes-Why-Your-Organic-Traffic-has-Dropped-...-Its-Not-Googles-Fault.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThe SEO landscape has shifted dramatically over the last few years. Managing an organic traffic drop has become an exhausting reality for site owners as search volatility hits all-time highs. When your numbers plummet overnight, the questions start spinning: Did Google roll out another unannounced core update? Are AI overviews stealing your clicks? Was it a negative SEO attack, or did you accidentally break something under the hood? As you dig through dashboards looking for answers, the frustration grows while a clear solution feels further away than ever.<\/p>\n
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We\u2019ve been in the SEO trenches for a long time, wearing every hat imaginable: digital marketers, tool developers, consultants, and copywriters. But first and foremost, we are site owners just like you. We\u2019ve ridden the volatile waves of organic traffic, and we know exactly how stressful it is to watch your Google referral numbers plummet without warning. To take the guesswork out of your recovery strategy, we\u2019ve put together a comprehensive breakdown of the top 17 reasons behind a sudden organic traffic drop, completely unrelated to Google algorithmic updates or manual penalties.<\/p>\n
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With no further introduction, below you can find the top 17 causes that can lead to massive organic traffic drop:\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Conclusion<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n You might remember \u201cFace Off\u201d , a movie from \u201897 where Nicolas Cage is a terrorist and John Travolta is an FBI agent. And, as it happens in movies, they became obsessed with one another. Travolta needs information from Cage’s brother, so he undergoes an operation in which he gets Cage’s face; a few plot twists later and Cage has Travolta’s. They continue to pursue each other with new identities, the bad guy the good guy, the good guy the bad guy and so on and (almost) no one knew who is who. Dizzy yet?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Well, the situation is similar if you decide to change your domain name and not tell anyone about it, especially the search engines. Just with less drama and action scenes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Whatever reasons you might have for changing your domain name, if you want to be sure that your organic traffic drops, do not tell anyone about the change. Especially Google.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Not even a word. This way, you\u2019ll make sure that your new name, as well as your search engine traffic, will be like they don\u2019t even exist in the digital world.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Yet, if you do want to keep your organic search traffic and ranks, once you make a domain name change, let Google now by using a\u00a0specially designed\u00a0tool<\/a> in your Search Console.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n An unexpected drop in organic traffic isn’t always caused by a core algorithm update. Often, it is the direct result of a brand reputation crisis. Modern search engines and AI engines use advanced Sentiment Analysis to measure brand authority. If a surge of negative sentiment occurs across the web, your algorithmic trust score drops, leading to a rapid decline in search engine visibility.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0To protect your search visibility, you need the uncompromised speed of<\/span> BrandMentions<\/b>. Built for immediate action, this brand monitoring tool offers the fastest deep-web crawling architecture on the market.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n It delivers true real-time crisis alerts directly to your inbox the exact second a negative sentiment spike occurs, allowing you to intercept and repair the damage long before it triggers a permanent ranking drop.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n How Real-Time Brand Monitoring Protects SEO Trust<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n AI discovery engines prioritize websites with high topical authority and positive sentiment. Managing this requires immediate data synchronization:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n One good way of causing a drop in your organic search traffic, just as the title of the chapter says, is to index each and every single page from your website and not prune your content.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Google makes constant efforts to improve\u00a0the search algorithm and detect quality content and that is why it\u00a0rolled out the Google Panda 4.0<\/a> update. \u00a0What is this update really doing?\u00a0It deranks low quality content and boosts the high quality one, according to Google’s idea of valuable content<\/a>. In the screenshot below you can see what kind of content you shouldn’t be looking into if you are really determined in\u00a0making a mess out of your organic traffic.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Every site has its evergreen content, which attracts organic traffic, and some pages that are deadwood.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you don’t want your search traffic dropped, in the Google Index you should only have pages that you\u2019re interested in ranking.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Otherwise you might end up polluting your website’s traffic. The pages filled with obsolete or low quality content aren\u2019t useful or interesting to the visitor. Thus, they should be pruned for the sake of your website\u2019s health.\u00a0Low quality pages may affect the performance of the whole site. Even if the website itself plays by the rules, low-quality indexed content may ruin the organic traffic of the whole batch.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you don’t want your Google traffic dropped dramatically\u00a0due to indexing and content pruning, we are going to list below the steps you need to take in order to\u00a0successfully prune your own content. We’ve developed this subject in a previous blog post<\/a>. \u00a0Yet, before doing so, we want to stress on the fact that it\u2019s not easy to take the decision of removing indexed pages from the Google Index and, if handled improperly, it may go very wrong. Yet, at the end of the day, \u00a0you should keep the Google Index fresh with info that is worthwhile to be ranked and which helps your users.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n There are various\u00a0methods to identify your indexed pages. You can find several methods here<\/a>, and choose the one which is most suitable for your website.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n One way to do this is through your Search Console account, just like in the screenshot below.\u00a0There\u00a0you\u2019ll find the\u00a0total number of your indexed pages\u00a0along with a graphic display of its evolution in the Index Status.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n In order to get the\u00a0whole bundle of internal links for your website, in the same Search Console, you need to go to the Search Traffic > Internal Links category. This way you\u2019ll have a list with all the pages from your website (indexed or not) and also the number of links pointing to each. This can be a great incentive for discovering which pages should be subject to content pruning.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Of course all your pages matter but some matter more than others. That is why, in the pruning process it’s highly important to identify data regarding the number of impressions, clicks, click-through-rate and average position.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Once you know the pages that pull you down, as painful as it might be sometimes, \u00a0you need to start to no-index those pages. \u00a0As hard as it was to create them, and make them well seen by Google, when it comes to getting them off the search engine’s radar, things are a bit less complicated. Below you can find two ways to\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n A great way to break your web traffic\u00a0without even noticing is through robots.txt. Indeed, the robots.txt file has long been debated among webmasters and it can be a strong tool when it is well written. Yet, the same robots.txt can really be a tool you can shoot yourself in the foot with. We’ve written an in-depth article on the critical mistakes that can ruin your traffic\u00a0in another post<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Before developing this subject further, indulge me to remind you that according to Google a robots.txt file is a file at the root of your site that indicates those parts of your site you don\u2019t want accessed by search engine crawlers. And although there is plenty of documentation<\/a> on this subject, there are still many ways you can suffer an organic search traffic drop. Below we are going to list two common yet critical mistakes when it comes to robots.txt.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \nGoogle\u2019s algorithm gets better and better and is now able to read your website\u2019s CSS and JS code and draw conclusions about how useful the content is\u00a0for the user. As Google itself stated,<\/a> disallowing CSS, Javascript and even images counts towards your website\u2019s overall search traffic.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n A wildcard is a symbol used to replace or represent one or more characters. Wildcards are typically either an asterisk (*), which represents one or more characters or question mark (?), which represents a single character.<\/p>\n By now, you must be asking yourself how can an * can cause a sudden drop in organic traffic.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Well, when it comes to robots.txt, it can.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Let\u2019s say you wish to block all URLs that have the PDF. extension. If you write in your robots.txt a line that looks like this: User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: \/*.pdf$. The sign \u201c$\u201d from the end basically tells bots that only URLs ending in PDF shouldn\u2019t be crawled while any other URL containing \u201cPDF\u201d should be. I know it might sound complicated, yet the moral of this story is that a simple misused symbol can break your marketing strategy along with your organic traffic. Below you can find a list with the correct robotx.txt wildcard matches and, as long as you keep count of it, you should be on the safe side of website’s traffic.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n When migrating your website from one domain to another, if you want to make sure you instantly lose any traffic to your website that you are\u00a0 currently enjoying and all your new visitors will be greeted with a 404 page, do not implement proper redirects.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Any good organic search traffic you experience at the moment can be just a memory if you fail to do 301 redirects.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Let\u2019s say you just did a rebranding of your business and among others, you\u2019ve changed your site\u2019s address. Will your Google traffic drop dramatically\u00a0? Only if you choose to do so.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n With only a few lines of code you can transfer all the organic search traffic from one domain to another.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n What the 301 permanent redirects do is to redirect any visitor, including search engines, to your new site. Along with the direct traffic, the age, authority and reputation of your old website in Google is transferred to the new web address.<\/p>\n How long should you keep your 301s? Like most of the love songs lyrics say, forever and ever.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Will it help you get rid of a Google Penalty<\/a>? Well, this is debatable but we have a previous interesting blog post<\/a> written on this matter.\u00a0 <\/p>\n In case you think that you can move a part of your website from a subdirectory to a subdomain without having\u00a0your search traffic dropped, think again.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Let’s say that you want to move your blog from a subdirectory URL (yourwebsiterulz.com\/blog) to a subdomain (blog.yourwebsiterulz.com). Although Matt Cutts, former Google engineer, said<\/a> that “they are roughly equivalent\u00a0and you should basically go with whichever one is easier for you in terms of configuration, your CMSs, all that sort of stuff”, it seems that things are a bit more complicated than that.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There are some interesting case studies<\/a> on this issue solely that show exactly the opposite. Below you can see a screenshot from the iwantmyname.com case<\/a>\u00a0of switching between subdirectory and subdomain. After a while of traffic\u00a0dropping, they decided to revert the changes.\u00a0<\/p>\n Screenshot taken from iwantmyname.com<\/p><\/div>\n Yet, what is the problem, actually?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Is not Google clever enough to know that the newly created subdomain is part of the same domain?\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Well,\u00a0Google has made strides in this direction and got much better at identifying and associating content that’s on a subdomain with the main domain. The problem is they’re not good enough to rely on that factor yet and major organic\u00a0traffic drop can come from this direction.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n With the hope that this SEO technicality will change in time, the recommendation for the moment is to keep your content on one single sub and root domain, preferably in subfolders.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The best movies don\u2019t always win the best prizes. A similar thing happens in the digital marketing world.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The best content doesn\u2019t always have the best organic search traffic, yet search engines are really trying to rank sites in accordance to their content.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Just by looking at the latest Google updates<\/a> we can tell that the search engine is constantly refining and improving its algorithm that automatically scores pages based on content quality. There are even quality rating guidelines<\/a>\u00a0and Google penalties content based.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Other metrics and\u00a0factors count as well but content is among those top ranking factors; and you should not let your content get dusty unless you are decided to leave the digital world for good.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Going back to the analogy with the movies, having a great script is not enough; you need great acting, awesome music, good directing, etc. in order to win the prize for the best picture.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You should not keep count of content only if you are planning to have a sudden drop in organic traffic. And if you are already having a good web traffic, do not count on it very much. The SERP is volatile, tons of content is being written as you are reading this and you need to keep up.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Let\u2019s take a look at the screenshot below. We\u2019ve analyzed two websites, livescience.com and emedicinehealth.com.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n And although livescience.com has way more links than its competitor, it seems that emedicinehealth.com is performing\u00a0better for a lot of important keywords. Why, you might wonder. Well, the answer is simple: content. And although they are both offering good content, livescience.com is a site offering general information about a lot of things while emedicinehealth.com offers articles highly related to the topics, leaving the impression that this site really offers reliable content. We are not saying that the 5 mil links livescience.com has do not matter, yet it seems that in some cases content weighs more.<\/p>\n \nDo you know the saying: don\u2019t count the days but make the days count? Well, this somehow applies in the SEO world as well.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Or, at least, in the link building industry. Just by looking at the number of links and having an ongoing concern of multiplying the links won\u2019t take you to first page on Google. On the contrary; it will probably make you disappear for SERP.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I invite you to take a look at the screenshot below.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If we are looking at the number of links and that number only, things look great: 3 mil links. That\u2019s quite something; great performance. Yet, when looking at the number of referring domain, all your appreciation disappears, right? Only 30 referring domains that generated 3 million links.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What would you prefer: 30 journalists writing about you in 3 mil articles or 100 journalists writing about you in 1.000 articles ?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n In which situation do you think you\u2019ll gain more credibility and authority? (Really hoping you’ll choose\u00a0the second case).\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It might not be news to you that Google looks primarily at mobile content, rather than desktop when deciding how to rank results.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A \u201cmy business is concentrated on desktop,\u00a0I don\u2019t care about mobile\u201d attitude might lead you straight to the end of page 99 in Google.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n It\u2019s called mobile first indexing and, as Google stated,<\/a> \u00a0it means that algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site\u2019s content to score\u00a0pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ignore mobile first indexing if you want Google to ignore your website.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Are you familiar with the\u00a0saying: it doesn’t matter how slow you move as long as you don’t stop? Great one, right? Well, forget about it when it comes to your website performance.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Things look quite different\u00a0when it comes to hosting.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A good hosting isn\u2019t going to guarantee you a spot at the top. But a slow host will surely lead to a drop in organic search traffic.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Google kept on saying how page speed is affecting the websites’ performance. They even created a tool <\/a>for this. \u00a0There are several website speed performance<\/a> tools out there that come in handy when trying to figure out the performance of your website.\u00a0<\/p>\n Screenshot taken from tools.pingdom.com<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n Cheap hosting might sound tempting and we cannot blame you for this. Yet, in terms of costs-benefits, it might “cost” you the traffic of your website, the revenue of your business. <\/p>\n Sometimes sharing is scaring.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n If you are on a shared server, as convenient as\u00a0it might be for you, one resource-hungry neighbor can kill your site’s speed and therefore your organic search traffic. Better solutions when it comes to servers can be VPS (virtual private servers) or dedicated servers. They are indeed more expensive but they pay off.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ignorance is a bliss…sometimes. But never when it comes to digital marketing. Unless\u00a0you want to experience some really nasty\u00a0traffic dropped dramatically.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n It might happen to have some lost links from now and then or a broken page due to some crawling issue or something similar. Yet, when your broken pages and links form up a figure just as big as your phone number, then you might be facing a problem; in terms of site user experience and organic traffic\u00a0as well. Your bounce rate will increase, your overall usability, you will be loosing links and therefore you will start asking yourself “why did my organic traffic drop”?<\/p>\n Take a look at the image below. The number of broken pages is enormous, not to mention the link juice lost. Does traffic\u00a0suffer due to this issue? You bet it does. Is there a fix for this? The answer is again yes.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The irony is that along with all the issues broken pages<\/a> bring, there are some forseen opportunities as well. If you are interested in getting back your lost traffic\u00a0and that link juice from your broken pages, two easy workouts can be done:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n A similar thing happens when it comes to lost links. As mentioned before, having a couple of lost links is not such a big problem. Yet, when you are losing hundreds of links on a daily basis, that should be an alarm signal for you. \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n As we are your organic search traffic number one fan, below we’ve listed two steps that can help you out in the event you are experiencing a massive lost link drop:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Having lots of traffic\u00a0is an entirely desirable outcome and\u00a0there’s nothing wrong in keeping that goal in mind whatever strategy you chose to implement.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Keep your head in the clouds but your feet on the ground.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n But what happens when your desire goes beyond any realistic expectation? You hire an SEO company that will guarantee you the first position on the most competitive keywords ever.\u00a0<\/p>\n Indeed, the first thing you should ask any digital marketing company is:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Will my site rank #1? But if the answer is yes, start looking for somebody else, don’t hire them!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n This, of course, if you do care about your organic traffic and your overall inbound marketing strategy\u00a0and you don’t want to make a mess out of them. The truth is that Google has so many rules and algorithms for scoring\u00a0a website and that the SERP is so volatile that it’s nearly impossible to predict which site will have the best organic traffic and from what exact reasons.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you want to drop from your hard worked #14 position to #79, you can start looking for companies that advertise themselves like the one in the image below. We don’t even know what to believe\u00a0when it comes to companies that promise guaranteed instant\u00a0traffic: that they are folly (in which case you don\u2019t need them) or charlatans (in which case you don\u2019t want them). If you want to find out more about SEO agencies and how they can ruin your website’s traffic, we\u00a0wrote a previous\u00a0blog post<\/a> on this.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n You might know by now that unnatural links can get you into trouble and can cause sudden drop in organic traffic. \u00a0Google has developed a whole series of algorithm<\/a>\u00a0changes and penalties<\/a> named after cute animals that make unnatural links\u00a0the persona non grata of the internet.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Yet, if you are really determined in screwing up your Google organic traffic, having a lot of unnatural links might not be enough.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Having lots of unnatural links connected to one page only, well that is true dedicated work for losing massive traffic.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Just take a look at the screenshot below. Indeed, there is an unnatural link issue there; but more than that, the majority of unnatural links lead to just one page.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you are in a situation similar to the one presented in the screenshot below, we recommend you to fix it\u00a0because\u00a0if it hasn’t\u00a0affected you until now, it will for sure on the long term. The easiest way to do identify your unnatural links and get rid of them is by using specialized\u00a0tools<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The best way to predict the future is to invent it. This seems to be Google’s motto. Because yes, Google can “read” your image and this can be a ranking factor. We documented this in a previous article<\/a>. With this already happening, the use of alt and title tags is commonplace. \u00a0Therefore, no alt tags and title tags = no traffic.\u00a0<\/p>\n Google places a relatively high value on alt texts to determine what is on the image but also to determine the topic of surrounding text.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n First things first, you should use alt text not just for SEO purposes but also because blind and visually impaired people won’t know what the image is about. \u00a0Second, yes, the title and alt tags influence your traffic\u00a0as mentioned<\/a> by the search engine themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n If you want to keep your organic traffic\u00a0safe and sound, include subject in the title tag and in the image alt text.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n We\u2019re not saying you should spam with your focus\u00a0keywords into every alt tag or title. But you need a good, related image for your posts in which it makes sense to have the keywords you are interested in there.\u00a0<\/p>\n Putting it simple, duplicate content is content that appears on the world wide web in more than one place. Is this such a big problem for the readers? Maybe not. But it\u00a0is a very big problem for you if you are having duplicate content (internally or externally) as the search engines don’t know which version of the content is the original one and which one\u00a0they should be ranking.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Can duplicate content get your website into trouble? The answer is yes.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/div>\n1. Changing Your Domain Name and Not Telling Google<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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![\"change](\"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/change-of-adress-tool.png\" "\\"change")
<\/p>\n <\/div>\n2. Real-Time Crisis Detection: How Negative Sentiment Drops Your Rankings<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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<\/div>\n3. Indexing Everything Without Pruning Your Content<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"quality](\"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/quality-content-1024x538.png\" "\\"quality")
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Step 1.\u00a0Identify Your Site\u2019s Google Indexed Pages<\/h4>\n
![\"search](\"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/search-console-google-index-1024x590.png\" "\\"search")
<\/p>\n![\"search](\"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/search-index2-1024x455.png\" "\\"search")
<\/p>\nStep 2.\u00a0Identify Your Site\u2019s Low Traffic\u00a0and Underperforming Pages<\/h4>\n
![\"Google](\"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/analytics3-1024x639.png\" "\\"Google")
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Step 3. No-Index the Underperforming Pages<\/h4>\n
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<\/div>\n4. Getting Your Pages De-indexed by Google Through robots.txt<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"massive-ranking-drop-robots-txt\"](\"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/massive-ranking-drop-robots-txt.jpg\" "\\"massive-ranking-drop-robots-txt\\"")
<\/p>\n1. Blocking CSS or Image Files from Google Crawling<\/strong><\/h4>\n
![\"allow](\"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/allow-google-crawl-ajax.jpg\" "\\"allow")
<\/p>\n2.Wrong Use of Wildcards<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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![\"correct-wildcard-matches-robotstxt\"](\"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/correct-wildcard-matches-robotstxt.jpg\" "\\"correct-wildcard-matches-robotstxt\\"")
<\/p>\n <\/div>\n5. Redesigning Your Website & Not Doing 301 Redirects to Old Pages<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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\nYou can find more info on how to implement redirects correctly, directly from the\u00a0Google representatives<\/a> themselves.<\/p>\n![\"SEO](\"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/jmg-seo-visibility-drop1.jpg\" "\\"SEO")
<\/p>\n <\/div>\n6. Moving from a Subdirectory to a Subdomain<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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![\"rank](\"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/switch-to-subdomain.png\" "\\"rank")
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<\/div>\n7. Giving Up Creating Great Content or Creating Content at All<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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![\"Site](\"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/site-explorer1.png\" "\\"Site")
<\/p>\n <\/div>\n8. Counting Your Links and Not Your Referring Domains<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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![\"cognitiveSEO](\"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/cognitiveSEO-site-explorer1-1024x547.png\" "\\"cognitiveSEO")
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<\/div>\n9. Ignoring Mobile First Indexing<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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<\/div>\n10. Moving Your Site to a Slow Host<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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![\"Web](\"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/slow-webhost-1024x568.png\" "\\"Web")
\nShared servers are a common solution and they do work well for most of the sites.<\/p>\n\n
<\/div>\n11. Ignoring Your Broken Pages and Links<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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![\"broken](\"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/broken-pages-issue-1024x479.png\" "\\"broken")
<\/a><\/p>\n\n
![\"daily](\"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/lost-links-explorer-1024x379.png\" "\\"daily")
<\/a><\/p>\n\n
<\/div>\n12. Hiring an SEO Company That Will Guarantee You Instant Traffic<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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![\"SEO](\"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/SEO-company-rank-1.png\" "\\"SEO"){kind=icon}
<\/p>\n <\/div>\n13. Dropping Lots of Shady Links on Other Sites<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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![\"link](\"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/link-to-one-unnatural-page-1024x289.png\" "\\"link")
<\/p>\n <\/div>\n14. Not Using Alt and Title Tags<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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![\"alt](\"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/alt-text2.png\" "\\"alt")
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<\/div>\n15. Duplicating Your Content – Internally & Externally<\/strong><\/h3>\n