4 Mistakes That Hurt Your SEO Score

4 Mistakes That Hurt Your SEO Score

Trying to find what’s hurting your SEO score? Don’t feel bad! Many like yourself are scratching their heads, wondering what‘s negatively affecting their website’s search engine rankings. The good news is that we have some ideas that will help you find the source of your problems!

In this article, we’re going to look at four mistakes that hurt you SEO score. By the end, you’ll know the most common issues and how to correct them. Grab a pen and paper while review the facts you need to know—we’re about to break it down!

Top SEO Score Mistakes

1. Violating Copyrights

This is a pitfall that many first-time website owners fall into. They use copyrighted images without permission and receive notices of violations—and as the copyright violations pile up, their SEO score goes down.

Google imposes penalties on websites that violate copyrights. For this reason, it’s important you read up on copyright laws and understand how to legally use images, videos, and other materials you add to your website. If you’re wondering how to find royalty–free images to use on your website, look into Unsplash and Pixabay.Photographers post high-quality images you can use for free, no attribution required. Instead of using copyrighted images that can potentially hurt your SEO score, find royalty-free images.

2. Building Low-Quality Links

A common SEO practice is to build links to your website. Some beginners take this to the extreme and build as many links as they can from any and every website. While this may seem like a good idea, it can negatively affect your SEO score!
Links from authoritative websites help your search engine score because, to Google and other search engines, the links represent confirmation from credible sources. On the other hand, when search engines see low-quality sources linking to your website, they also see your website as low quality.
Avoid building links that don’t lend credibility to your website. Too many can invalidate your website and hurt your SEO score. All links are not created equal!

3. Duplicating Content

Search engines want to see online content improve over time, so copying information from elsewhere isn’t going to help you—in fact, if you create exact duplicates of information, you’ll most definitely see a drop in your SEO score.
Even reusing your own content will hurt your score, so make sure not to copy and paste articles from one blog to the other. As challenging as it may be, you need to continually generate new ideas and new information.
If you happen to be repeating information that’s already been stated elsewhere online, write it in your own words—take old content and put a fresh spin on it. Repurpose information in a way that adds new meaning for your audience, and your SEO score will benefit.

4. Changing Your Website Structure

Modifying your website can negatively affect its SEO score. Sometimes this is only temporary, but, in other cases, it can leave you with permanently lower search engine rankings. Bad redirects and meta description updates, for example, can cause drops in scores. Fortunately, these are easy fixes that don’t take long to correct.
On the other hand, drastic website changes can cause permanent issues. Altering your website’s URLs or link structure, for example, can significantly affect your SEO.
You can avoid issues like these by planning your website structure out before building it.

It’s best to map out what you want your site to look like before creating permalinks and silos for your pages. This will reduce the chances your website SEO will suffer if you have to tweak your content later on down the line.

Final Words

You can maintain your website SEO score by avoiding a few common mistakes. Here’s a quick review:

• Read up on copyright laws to avoid facing SEO penalties from illegal usage violations.
• Make sure the links you’re building to your website are of high value. Too many low-quality links can hurt your credibility
• Duplicate content gets thrown out of searches, so make sure everything you publish is unique.
• Altering your website structure can alter your SEO. Plan your website out before building it to avoid penalties.

If you want high search rankings, keep SEO in mind when you’re developing your website. With time and patience, you’ll get the results you’re looking for. Just don’t let these beginner’s mistakes set you back!