Why Google may be avoiding your blog…

Did you ever notice that it seems that Google may be avoiding your blog?   Its true!  You want to get noticed by Google, not be avoided, right?

Have you ever looked at your stats and wondered why you are not getting much traffic from search engines, or your traffic is sporadic at best?

These simple things that you could be doing, will have google avoiding your blog like the plague!   I was doing a few things wrong, but once I fixed them, I found that Google went from being not even in my top 10 of referring traffic… to in my top three!

Wondering what makes search engines avoid your blog? Here are a few places to start:

1. Duplicate Content –
   Search engines are always on the look out for duplicate content because there are so many “scraper” sites out there.People who put websites up and, instead of coming up with their own ideas and thoughts, they just steal the work of others. Google (and other search engines) send out little spiders that crawl through sites and check for this. Since these are bots, and not people, even if you are re-using a post with permission, the little bots won’t know that.One or two duplicate posts might not be an issue, but you certainly don’t want to make a habit of it. If you allow guest posts on your site, make sure that you are receiving an exclusive piece, and not something that has already been done on their blog or some one else’s.  I always ask this ahead of time (“Is this being used anywhere else on the web?”)  It could be damaging for both blogs if you are running the same piece, so it’s in every one’s best interest to keep content new and exclusive!If you guest post somewhere, instead of sharing the entire post on your site, you could consider sharing a “teaser”, with a few sentences about your post, and then direct your readers to the site where you are posting that day. It’s a great way to still be able to share your guest content with your readers, without jeaprodizing your relationship with the search engines.
2. Selling Links
    This is also a big no-no, and one that is not talked about enough! From time to time you might be contacted by a company wanting you to add their link to one of your posts in exchange for money. While this might seem like easy money, you need to be cautious, because this practice goes against google’s terms of service.Simply because it creates a poor experience for the user (the search-er) if sites are showing up high in search rankings because they have paid to be there, instead of earning their spot by having quality content. This is why it is so important to use the “nofollow” code when putting links in your sponsored posts.This tells google’s bots not to pay attention to that link or rank the site any higher in searches because of it. Here’s a great article from google about how “nofollow” works, if you need some help there. Keep in mind, you are still able to link to other sites within your posts. These links should just be natural in your writing, and not something that you are being paid to do. It’s perfectly fine to link out from your blog, it is typically just frowned upon when you are doing it for profit instead of to provide a positive experience for your readers.
3. Allowing Spam Comments
   Although you are not the one writing them, allowing spam comments to be published on your blog (and remain there) can also negatively affect your standings with the search engines.A lot of comments are clearly spam, but also be on the lookout for comments from real people that are spam-y. Lots of commenters are “link droppers” and just ask you to visit one or more of their blogs, without adding any real content to the conversation about your post. This can also be counted as spam, so you may not want to allow them to be posted.
4. Dead Links – Linking out to pages that no longer exist is another big one. It’s important to make sure that pages on your site, and pages that you link to lead to helpful pages and not a dead “error” page.Search engine bots look at these things as well and your site will be seen as lower quality if it consistently pulls up pages that do not exist (because you deleted them) or links out to things that are no longer there.

If you have been doing any of these things, the good news is, that they are pretty easy to fix!
Example:  If you have posts that were duplicates of guest-posts, just convert them to teaser posts so that they won’t be dead links, etc… 

Were you making any of these mistakes? How can you go about fixing them?

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