{"id":20859,"date":"2021-01-27T09:17:03","date_gmt":"2021-01-27T07:17:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/?p=20859"},"modified":"2024-05-30T17:00:27","modified_gmt":"2024-05-30T14:00:27","slug":"major-seo-mistakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/20859\/major-seo-mistakes\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Major SEO Mistakes You Might Make in 2024 How to Deal With Them – Backed by SEO Experts"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are many attributes that an SEO must have in order to be successful, but one of the most important ones is being willing to improve all the time. Improvement doesn’t always come from making things right. In fact, the only way you’ll really improve is by failing, over and over again.<\/p>\n

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However, when it comes to SEO, a mistake might pass by unnoticed. You might not have any idea that you’re doing something wrong. Now, there are thousands of horrible mistakes that you could be making, like not adding keywords in titles or engaging in low quality link building.<\/p>\n

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But here are some more subtle, modern mistakes that SEO might make these days.<\/p>\n

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\"major<\/p>\n

In order to find out people’s most common modern SEO mistakes, I decided to ask a number of renowned SEO experts the following question:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Can you think of one major\u00a0SEO<\/span>\u00a0mistake<\/span>\u00a0that is holding people’s websites back today?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Some of them were kind enough to take some of their time and share the wisdom with us, so keep reading because there’s top quality information lying ahead in this list of 10 SEO mistakes to avoid in 2020 and later on!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. You Don’t Fix Broken Pages with Backlinks<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
  2. You Publish Too Many Poor Quality Pages<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
  3. You Have Duplicate Content Issues<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
  4. You Target out of Reach Keywords<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
  5. You Ignore the Organic Search Traffic You Already Have<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
  6. You’re Using Unconfirmed SEO Theories<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
  7. You Don’t Consider User Search Intent While Writing Content<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
  8. You Don’t Optimize for the Right Keywords & Use Improper Meta Description<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
  9. You Over-Complicate Things<\/strong><\/a><\/li>\n
  10. You’re Not Starting with SEO in Mind Early On<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
     <\/div>\n

    1. You Don’t Fix Broken Pages with Backlinks<\/strong><\/h2>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Broken pages are really one major issue for websites, especially if they have backlinks pointing to them through those web pages. Ignoring broken pages can be a big mistake.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    John Doherty, Founder & CEO at Credo, a portal for connecting digital marketing experts with businesses, knows this and marks it as one of the biggest mistakes people make, as well as one of his team’s top priorities when optimizing websites:<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
    One major SEO mistake that I see holding back websites these days is not fixing their site’s broken pages that have backlinks pointing to them. I work with a lot of very large (100,000+ page) websites, and the first thing I do when we begin our engagement is look at their 404s\/410s and which ones of those have inbound external links. We then map out the 1:1 redirects and redirect those. This always shows a good gain in organic search traffic, and then we build on that momentum from there.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    \"\"<\/td>\nJohn Doherty<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    CEO at\u00a0Credo<\/a>\u00a0\/ @dohertyjf<\/a><\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

     <\/p>\n

    In the answer, John mentions a few things:<\/p>\n

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    Broken pages:<\/strong> First, we have the broken pages. Broken web pages are bad for the internet and, thus, bad for your website.<\/p>\n

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    Why you ask?<\/p>\n

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    Well, to understand why we first have to understand what a broken page actually is. A broken page is simply a page that doesn’t exist. You see, it’s not actually the broken page that matters, but the link that’s pointing to it.<\/p>\n

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    \n

    A page doesn’t really exist until another page links to it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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    When Google crawls a website, it always starts from the root domain. It crawls https:\/\/www.yoursite.com and then looks for links.<\/p>\n

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    \"404<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Let’s assume that the first link the crawler finds is under the About Us anchor text and it links to https:\/\/www.yoursite.com\/about-us\/ but the page returns a 404 response code<\/a><\/strong>, because there’s no resource on the server at that address.<\/p>\n

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    When Google’s crawler finds 404 pages, it wastes time and resources and it doesn’t like it.<\/p>\n

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    In theory, there is an infinity of 404 pages, as you could type anything after the root domain, but a 404 page doesn’t really take form until some other page that exists links to it.<\/p>\n

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    Now broken pages can occur due to two factors:<\/p>\n

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      \n
    1. You delete a page that has been linked to (broken link due to broken page)<\/li>\n
    2. Someone misspells a URL (broken page due to broken link)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Both the linking website as well as the linked website containing the 404 have to suffer. If you have too many broken links on your site, Google will be upset because you’re constantly wasting its resources.<\/p>\n

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      Backlinks:<\/strong> The second point John makes is regarding the backlinks pointing to the broken pages. As previously mentioned, some may occur due to people misspelling a URL, which isn’t your fault.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      However, if you have 10 websites that link to one of your pages and you delete that page because you think it’s no longer relevant, then you’re losing the equity that those 10 backlinks were providing. Bad for SEO!<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      The cognitiveSEO Site Explorer<\/a><\/strong> is great for finding out backlinks that point to broken pages on your website:<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      \"find<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      You can also have internal broken links, as well as external broken links pointing from your website to 404 pages on other sites and you should also fix those! Soon, on the 12 of December 2018, cognitiveSEO will launch its OnPage module which you’ll be able to use to determine if you have any broken internal links so make sure you check it out!. Here’s for the first time a quick preview to it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      \"find<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Big websites:<\/strong> After that, we see that John mentions something about big websites. Why? Pretty simple. It’s easier to mess things up on a big website. On a small website, you might have one or two 404s but they will be easy to spot and very easy to fix.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      They might have some backlinks each, but not much is lost. However, when you have hundreds of thousands of pages, that link equity scales up pretty quickly.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Redirects:<\/strong> Lastly, there are the redirects. John tells us that to fix the issue, he always does the proper redirects. By using a 301 redirect from the broken link\/page to another page that is relevant, we can pass the link equity from the wasted backlinks.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      For maximum effect, don’t just redirect to the homepage or some page you want to rank if it’s not relevant. Instead, link to the most relevant page and then use internal links on relevant anchor texts surrounded by relevant content sections to pass the equity to more important pages.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      This is the type of SEO fix that might bring invisible results ‘overnight’. Thanks, John, for this wonderful input!<\/p>\n

       <\/div>\n

      2.\u00a0<\/strong>You Publish Too Many Poor Quality Pages<\/h2>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Another issue that is generally related to bigger websites is the ‘thin content’ issue.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
      One very common mistake sites make is that they publish way too many poor quality pages on their site. As a result, Google sees the site has a lot of \u201cthin content\u201d and lowers the site\u2019s rankings across the board.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
      \"Eric<\/td>\nERIC ENGE<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
      CEO at\u00a0Stone Temple<\/a> \/ @stonetemple<\/a><\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Although not always the case, when you have a small website, it’s pretty easy to come up with some decent pages. However, when you have a site with thousands of pages, the effort required to have qualitative content on all of them is a lot bigger.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Thin content pages are pages that have no added value to what’s already on the web. Google doesn’t really have a reason to index the site so you’ll either end up in the omitted results<\/a><\/strong> or get this message in your Search Console:<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      \"thin<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      The message above is a manual action, which means that you’ll have to submit a review request and someone hired by Google will actually take a look at your website to determine if you’ve fixed the issue. This might take a long time, so be careful! However, it’s possible that the algorithm ‘penalizes’ your website without any warnings, by simply not ranking it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Matt Cutts, the former Head of Spam at Google puts it like this:<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n