SEO audit can be tricky and it could have an adverse effect on Google SERP rankings, if not done right. There could be many things that sabotage all of your SEO efforts which leads to dip or decrease in Google ranking or Website's overall traffic. Sometimes it doesn't matter how much ever effort you put for curating new pieces of content, tweaking technical part of SEO, building internal links and backlinks but in the end things mentioned in this blog will make all of your efforts futile sooner or later. The best thing to do to avoid such mistakes is that you should hire an SEO company or expert who can help you fix these errors and provide extensive SEO audits. If you don't prefer hiring a digital marketing company, then the best thing to do is to take up an SEO training course or Digital Marketing training which can help you for lifetime. Now, this blog will briefly outline the important things to remove from your site for better rankings.
It is a well-known fact that Google prefers fresh content. According to reports, there are almost 2 billion websites in the world and over 2 million blogs are being posted every single day. And it is estimated that Google has indexed over 63 billion pages indexed. So it is quite important to keep updating your content periodically or starting curating new pieces of content every day.
Back in the days, pages with 500 words were considered long-form content. But this isn't the case today. More the information of your website, higher will be rankings. According to Google, the pages with very thin content offer very little to no value to users or visitors.
When you put a lot of ads or affiliate links on a landing page or your website, it will disrupt the user experience and flow as it will annoy them. Also, these ads and affiliate links will, for sure, increase respective page's loading speed and time which can affect your Google rankings. More the ads or affiliate links, the more external resource that your website needs to load. To make things worse, it can make users leave your websites eventually.
It is already mentioned on Google's official Webmaster central blog - "Page that shows intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible." This doesn't mean that you shouldn't have pop-ups on your website. It is advised to have pop-ups that don't interrupt user experience. Exit pop-ups are the most widely used pop-ups method around the globe.
Well, this won't get you penalized by Google. Google, themselves, have mentioned that they don't penalize websites with duplicate content. But also, they won't rank a page or website with a considerable amount of duplicate content over original content. So it is highly recommended to remove all kinds of duplicate content on your website. Use tools like plagiarism checker to scrutinize the pages for duplicate content and remove them.
