Negative ranking factors are those techniques or tactics which are utilized by a website but rather than enhancing ranking, they actually do the opposite – they result in ranking penalties. No-one would deliberately set out to achieve bad rankings for their website, but there are SEO practitioners and SEO techniques which will damage your site’s ranking and harm your online reputation.
We’re going to look at what we consider to be the top 3 negative ranking factors:
• Malicious Cloaking
• Linking to Spam Sites
• Frequent downtime or inaccessibility
Malicious Cloaking
Cloaking is where the search engines are seeing one website but the human user is taken to another website or page rather than the one which the search engines have crawled.
The original reason for cloaking was benign – if you had a high ranking website, you didn’t want your competition being able to simply copy what you’d done, and so hiding the high ranking page code was a good idea. You got high ranking with your optimized web page and the human users got to see the content you wanted them to see but without them snaffling your precious code.
This was fine until search engine results started sending people looking for “movie” to “Reg’s Porn for Free” site. Search engines look to send human searchers to the most relevant result they can find, so it is crucial that what the search engine has seen and assessed is also what the human user will see and not something else.
Where Google finds cloaking has taken place, you can expect a penalty and especially if there is malicious intent, e.g. your optimized page is markedly different from the page your human users will see.
Linking to Spam Sites
Note we are talking about you linking to a spam site and not the other way around. If you are linking to a spam site, there is a pretty good chance that you are either part of the spam operation itself, are looking to use spam tactics on your own website visitors or are simply not providing relevant content for your users.
Nobody likes spam and Google customers will not thank them if search results start sending them to spam sites, so search engines do the natural thing – they penalize you.
Link building is an essential component of any SEO campaign; however it takes time to build a portfolio of good quality links but you must be careful to ensure that the outgoing links you create are to external sites which themselves provide good value and content for your users.
Frequent Downtime and Inaccessibility
Remember, search engines want to send users to websites which contain the most relevant content in relation to the keywords they employ when they use a search engine. There is nothing relevant about clicking on a high ranking url only to find an error message greeting the user advising the site is down and “please try again later”.
Sites which are experiencing poor server availability, are frequently exceeding their bandwidth allowance or excessive maintenance issues requiring off lining of the website, are going to find themselves increasingly penalized by Google and other search engines.
Takeaway
Negative ranking factors can and will severely harm your ranking efforts with search engines. Some techniques have developed with good intentions, such as cloaking; however they have become tarnished because of misuse. Other techniques are nothing more than an effort to hoodwink the search engines and users, and once uncovered you can expect severe penalties or even a suspension or ban from being ranked at all.
Fortunately, you control the impact of negative ranking factors on your website ranking but you must be prepared to consider the wider implications of onsite activities, for instance who you link to and who you have your website hosted with.
