30 Things Google Dislikes About Your Website

I recently wrote a post that offered 20 things that Google likes to help you gain some rank in search and make your website overall more useful to visitors. Gauging by the feedback, it seems that a good number of you found it helpful, so I thought I would continue along those lines and share some things that Google doesn’t like to help you avoid losing any rank you’ve worked so hard to gain.

Oddly enough, it is rumored that Google will penalize sites that are perfectly optimized as they make an assumption that the site was built for traffic only. So relax and know that being perfect is not necessary – or recommended. However, there are some things that make sense for visitor usability and these are the ones that you should pay the most attention to. Remember – the website is for them so make it a useful, productive, and a happy experience.

Now let’s bring on the list. While not exhaustive, this list does represent the key issues in website development that can hurt your chances of gaining ranking.

When constructing a website you want to AVOID some of these practices:

• Frames
• Cookies
• Absolute positioning
• Tables
• JavaScript navigation (Googlebot can’t run JavaScript)
• Deep site architecture. The further down a page is, the less chance it will get found.
• Duplicate tags on site
• Lack of designed 404 page
• Duplicate title/keywords
• Dynamic pages
• Large page file size / slow load time
• Redirect through refresh meta tags
• Doorway pages (also known as bridge pages, portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages)
• Doorway pages that redirect visitors without their knowledge use some form of cloaking, also a practice that Google does not like. 

As I mentioned above, don’t go crazy eliminating every one of these from your website but certainly avoid their use when inappropriate and if you must, use sparingly.

Some design and copy faux pas where you can lose points from Google:

• Splash pages – your website home page is a flash presentation
• Links with “?” in them
• Excessive cross linking
• Use of the <blink> tag
• Hidden content or font colors within 10 percent of background color RBG value
• Excessive use of graphics
• Keyword stuffing
• Saying anything even remotely negative about Google (what, you thought they wouldn’t be watching for this one?)
• Duplicate content on site

Some other things that Google doesn’t like:

• Multiple domains to the same website (different country variations are acceptable, but not multiple totally different domains, for example candy.com, chocolatecandy.com, and candynewyork.com all pointing to the same site)
• Automatically playing audio or video file
• Traffic buying
• Link buying
• Unsecured payment gateways
• Being linked to by a site Google dislikes (you’ll be punished by association)
• Hosting in a bad neighborhood. If your site coexists with bad sites on a shared server you go down with the ship, or in this case, the server.

Please share your experiences, ask us if something on this list isn’t clear, and by all means add to the conversation. Have you discovered any quirks that displease the Google Monster?