We’ve all seen the problems that search engines can have when they encounter sites that haven’t had the magic touch of a search engine friendly web designer.
Let’s take a look at some of the worst issues in action:
html in your title tag
Sometimes it would have been better if a site didn’t have a title tag.
404 errors
How hard is it to track when Googlebot finds a 404 error and tell an admin to create a redirect rule? In this case MSN 302 redirects to the 404 page which spits out a 200 OK server header. This means all the missing urls stay in the Google index for ever. Not a good idea.
Not having content on your homepage
Seriously, the reason shops only have one door is to make it easier for customers to get in. Splash pages, especially ones with no content at all, didn’t work 10 years ago and they certainly don’t work today.
Adding a date to makes content less linkable
The internet changes every day and good content becomes out of date very quickly. If I see an article from 2003 I assume it is inaccurate and won’t usually link to it. If the author chooses to put a date in h1 text at the top then the chances of a link are very low.
Requiring cookies, even for Googlebot
Most websites use cookies, the key is to find a way for the site to work well for people (and spiders) who don’t use cookies. Redirecting Googlebot to a page explaining how it can enable cookies in IE6 is a bad solution.
This post was going to be called “The 5 SEO Sins……” but judging by the current backlash I thought it was a good idea to remove number from the title. 
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Nice catch with the MSN 404 pages! That’s quite amusing…
That’s great!
I see so many sites with html in the title, especially stuff like em and bold tags, and sometimes h1. (Because obviously having an h1 tag within your page title makes it super search engine friendly!)
Funny stuff. The worst thing is when design agency/new media agency websites make these mistakes.
I agree with the date! Google likes sites that have been around for awhile!
“”TITLE GOES HERE”" on every page of the site.
Same meta description on every page of the site.
Content directly resolves at both www and non-www.
All site navigation in flash or javascript.
… the list goes on and on.
It is also a deadly sin when a website has a flash as its homepage or landing page. It looks cool, but for those who are concerned of SEO, it’s a big turn-off.
Tumbling out H tags (headings) around like peanuts is also a bad idea.
I just ran into a big problem where I changed the url structure on my site, didn’t 301 redirect properly and when google crawled my site I had tons of 404 errors listed within Google Webmaster tools.
Its all fixed but now I have to wait until Google notices.
I have to say rankings are driven by a lot of content on the home page, but successful sales pages, such as great landing pages, usually have little content. Sometimes, less is more. So, I respectfully disagree. You can optimize with external links alone in many cases. -Shane
I like the title you were planning to use. Forget what others have to say. It’s your blog, say what you wanna say.
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