Large amounts of time and effort are put into websites to guarantee improved SEO strength and higher rankings for businesses. These efforts are based on guidelines given from Google that help provide users with the best experience possible. Using these guidelines helps shape marketing strategies, with one small issue: Google’s guidelines are in constant flux. There are ongoing changes to improve the experience for users and this is something marketers must stay on top of to truly improve online success. Although we can only assume what the upcoming changes will be, we do know what causes low quality scores now. Here are some reasons why your national SEO strategy is hurting due to low quality score pages.
Unnatural Link Structure
You’re probably wondering what makes a link unnatural. To the untrained eye, it may not be obvious. Before Penguin changes in Google, there was a tactic used to improve SERPs of websites by creating numerous links focused on generalized terms. For example, many websites would have extremely large/long footers and sidebars with hundreds of links. These links would be titled “Holiday in Dubai” or “Dubai Hotels”. This created more links to crawl, but added no value to the website. If your website still contains these links, it is best to remove these from the site and even disavow these links.
Over-Monetization of Content
Google considers a webpage to be deceptive in nature if it is designed to trick users, search engines, or both. If it is deemed that this is the case, Google commands that these pages are recorded as being the lowest quality. This can be seen on web pages that have numerous links to outside sources. A tactic previously used by marketers would be to generate websites that have numerous links per page which the link owner would pay to be integrated into the site. Google quickly slammed this tactic and has demoted websites that use these tactics to the bottom of the barrel. Remove any links on sites similar to this as quickly as possible.
Ads Disguised As Content
This can get a little hairy. Although splash ads and some ads built onto webpages can be extremely effective aggregate tools for contact information, Google is not a fan. Some sites are beginning to see penalties for using too many of these on their websites (since about mid-2016). If you do plan to use these, use them strategically and sparingly.
E-Commerce
Although it is cheaper to pay someone to build a template website and get off the ground running, time and effort needs to be put into the building and creation of your e-commerce website for SEO purposes. Many shopping pages, carts and checkout pages that are derived from templates do not have terms & conditions, refund policies and shipping policies. Google is now looking at these as a factor for quality sites. Spend the extra money at the beginning to get the site right.
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