Everyone is jumping on the search engine optimization bandwagon these days. With the cost of pay-per-click advertising skyrocketing as competition intensifies, many corporations are looking to organic search as a way to diversify and lower their overall cost per action. SEO is certainly not free, but it is very effective in attracting thousands of potential customers to a site, if done correctly.
Many people spend hours a day optimizing their campaigns for Google and Yahoo by improving their title tags and writing better content, but unless you know the top organic search negatives, you won’t be able to avoid pitfalls along the way.
Here are the top 5 negative search engine ranking factors:

1. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags: Many people use content management systems that don’t create optimized titles and meta tags for each page. You should always try to keep your tags unique per page. Duplicate tags are the best way to end up in the supplemental index (the one people don’t normally see).

2. Duplicate Content – ​​Using duplicate content on your web page tells search engines that you don’t really have any new value to add for your audience. So you shouldn’t be surprised if search engines try to penalize you for using other people’s content on your site.

3. Linking to Banner Farms – Linking to a site is similar to giving it a vote of confidence. If you link to a spam or link farm, you will lose your credibility with search engines. Always try to avoid linking to any site you don’t know about or trust.

4. Sell Links – Google specifically hates people who try to gain an unfair competitive advantage over their rivals and manipulate search results. Buying and selling links used to work for a while, but selling can get you penalized these days. Buyers are less likely to be penalized, but there have been cases where engines have discounted paid links from serial buyers.

5. Server Errors – You should always try to adopt a hosting plan that is reliable and has 99.9% uptime. You simply can’t afford to have your site down when Google agents visit your pages. That just penalizes you and it can take a long time to get your ranking back.

Google and other engines are all about providing quality search results to search engines. It just makes them look bad by making the above mistakes. Focus on quality and value to your audience, and your organic results will follow.