#1 Blocking Crawlers with Robots.txt
This might sound obvious, but it’s still one of the most common ranking killers. Accidentally disallowing Googlebot from crawling key pages in your robots.txt can wipe your visibility. Always check your robots file before pushing live, and audit it during site migrations or platform changes. One rogue line can tank your traffic overnight.
#2 Duplicate Content (And You Didn’t Even Realize)
Copying and pasting across pages? Letting CMS filters create multiple URLs for the same content? Or maybe you’re syndicating articles without a canonical tag? All of these create duplicate content issues that dilute your ranking power. Google doesn’t know which page to rank, so it may rank none of them. Always canonicalize, consolidate, and rewrite.
Use Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to find duplicate titles and meta tags. Review index coverage in Search Console for unnecessary variants. And when in doubt—less is more. Merge and build strength on one version.
#3 Thin Content and Keyword Gimmicks
SEO content doesn’t mean 300 words of fluff with a keyword jammed into every paragraph. That’s how you get ignored—or worse, filtered out by Google’s Helpful Content System. Thin pages don’t provide value. They don’t rank. They just clutter your index and confuse crawlers. Instead, build deep, useful content with real insight and structure.
If it doesn’t help your user, don’t publish it. Quality > quantity, every time.
#4 Chain Redirects and Soft 404s
Redirect chains slow down crawl flow and dilute link equity. Soft 404s—pages that look like real pages but serve no real content—waste crawl budget and create UX dead ends. Always aim for direct, clean 301s when consolidating URLs. Audit your redirects every few months and keep your internal linking updated to point to final destinations.
Test with Chrome DevTools, Lighthouse, and Screaming Frog’s redirect report. Every redirect is a decision—make it intentional.
#5 Ignoring Mobile and Speed
If your site isn’t mobile-first, it’s already last. Google uses mobile-first indexing, so your mobile UX is your real UX. And speed matters. Slow sites don’t just frustrate users—they drop in rankings. Optimize your layout for mobile, reduce layout shift, and audit speed regularly with PageSpeed Insights and WebPageTest.
Don’t wait for a penalty to tell you something’s wrong. These mistakes are 100% preventable. Avoid them, and you’re already ahead of half the internet.
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