This interactive infographic shows the 200 things you need to know about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), sorted in order of priority. Learn how to use the website ranking infographic. Click one of the links below to filter by a specific category.
Google Panda rewards sites with high quality content and penalises 'thin' sites that have very little, poor quality, or automated content. Overall the message is, write high quality content for your site and write enough for your visitors' needs.
Greg Corrado in Google's A.I. team said that in the few months it has been deployed, RankBrain has become the third most important signal contributing to the result of a search query (after content and links in joint first place). It uses artificial intelligence to help refine the search results and put the best result first. This means a significant part of Google's overall algorithm is intangible and fluctuating and makes it even more important that you focus on creating content that is likely to impress your visitors, rather than trying to artificially manipulate the search results.
Visitors should be able to easily identify where the information they need is, how to buy a product for e-commerce sites, how to contact the company, etc. This helps improve your conversion rate, time users will spend on your site and your SEO.
Google's latest Artificial Intelligence system can tell where in the world almost any photo was taken, so it's likely they have an algorithm that can guess how attractive a website is. More importantly, your visitors certainly can!
Incoming links from websites and pages on the same topic as yours count a lot more than links from irrelevant websites. If most of your incoming links are from irrelevant sites, you're likely to be penalised by Google.
The Description Metatag appears in the search results and it's essential that it's well-written as this will improve the Click Through Rate (CTR). It also helps if it contains relevant keywords, particularly near the start of it.
In terms of what you can easily change on a web page, the Title Metatag is perhaps the single most important organic SEO factor. This is because it appears in bold in search results, so if it's well-written helps Click Through Rate, and including a keyword, preferably at the start of it helps SEO.
Including a healthy number of keywords in the content of a page is important for SEO, however normally a 'healthy number' is a wide range. What's important is that you include the relevant keywords but don't do keyword stuffing and repeat them endlessly.
Typically the more words on a page the better that page will rank.
For your website to be effective it must function correctly. If you do an SEO analysis it's therefore worth checking that contact forms, search forms, ecommerce, etc. all work.
CMS systems like Drupal and Wordpress have great SEO built in by default and have many options that let you create SEO optimized websites. With many CMS systems it is literally impossible to fully optimize your site (e.g. URLs are a string of random characters, the Meta Title has to be identical to the h1 title, text is converted to images, etc.). Choose your CMS carefully.
Google's Penguin algorithm updates penalise sites that use keyword stuffing (repeating the same keyword too often) either on-page or in the anchor text of links. Avoid using keywords excessively in your content.
Having a responsive design means that your site will adapt to any size browser and look good whether visitors are on a mobile device, tablet or desktop computer. Google also gives responsive websites a boost if visitors are on mobiles.
Google values original, attractive images that enhance the rest of the content on the site, as will your visitors; whether it's a relevant photo, an illustration or an infographic. Pages with at least one image, or other rich media appear significantly higher and are also more likely to be shared and linked to.
Visitors need to be able to easily read text and it's therefore important that there's sufficient contrast between your text and the background. If these are so similar as to be indistinguishable from each other, Google may also penalise you for hidden text.
A good colour scheme might be vibrant, calm or playful, depending on the topic of your website and choosing a suitable colour scheme helps reinforce the message. Your colour scheme should match your product.
Images of around 500 x 400px or larger are significantly more likely to appear high in Google's image search results. Including reasonably sized, original images on a page also help the page to rank better. It's good practice to specify the image width as a % in html, so that it resizes on mobile devices and to upload correctly sized images, so they load quickly.
If your domain was previously penalised by Google or promoted an unethical business it will be harder to get it to rank well. In this instance, it's particularly important to complete a backlink analysis and remove or disavow any links that are irrelevant or from bad neighbourhoods.
Having a .co.uk helps your site appear higher in the UK, same with .fr for France, etc. If you have a .com or other international domain and want to appear high for a specific country you can use International Targeting to achieve the same result.
Targeting keywords that are highly relevant and have a healthy search volume but low organic SEO competition is a good strategy to drive more traffic to your website.
See our tips on selecting multilingual keywords.
It used to be 'the more links the better'. Now only quality links matter and the more quality links the better. Having a sizeable number of poor quality or unnatural links will hinder rather than help you.
The higher the Domain Authority of the website linking to you, the more SEO boost your site will receive.
MOZ Trust is a measure of how reputable a website is and the higher the MOZ trust of incoming links, the more reputable your website will be perceived as.
Links from social media websites like Facebook and Twitter are treated separately to links from other websites by Google as they have a 'nofollow' tag assigned to them, however Google have confirmed that they take them into account. Social media is also a great way to reach new clients directly and to interact with existing clients.
Google looks for a natural link pattern and one way to achieve this is to have a wide variety of links. A site that has 50 links all from forums will rank far worse than a site with 50 links from a wide variety of sources.
The majority of links linking to your website should be in the same language as your own site. Any anchor texts should be in the same language as the page they appear on, regardless of your site's language.
In any industry there will be 'hub' sites which are recognised leaders or news portals and links from these sites carry more weight.
Google officially removed the PageRank tool on 7 March 2016, but they will use a similar algorithm internally. With PageRank the benefit or link juice of outgoing links was divided between all of them, therefore for links to your site, it's best if that page links to none or just a few other relevant pages.
Given the more words the better is true for your pages, it's also likely that you receive more benefit from a page with a 1,000 words (and/or high-quality images) than you would from a page with 20 words.
Links from a page with well-written content that has good spelling and grammar, a high number of visits, attractive images, etc. will provide more traffic and more SEO benefit.
Links from quality unique articles placed on single relevant websites or blogs give you a significant ranking boost. Avoid mass submitting articles or using article sites as Google may consider that a manipulative SEO practice.
Creating rich media like infographics is a good way to raise your brand awareness and generate more social media shares and likes. If these pages link to you, it also helps your SEO.
People love videos and are more likely to share them. They also have the highest chance of going viral. Links from video pages can be great for SEO.
4 years ago Google's SEO analysis didn't take spelling and grammar into account. Today it probably does and it's certainly mentioned in their Manual Rater Guidelines. Your visitors will also respect a well-written document and it reflects on the professionalism of your organisation.
A good SEO technique is to include keyword rich links to the most important landing pages on your site from every other page on your site.
Google have raters who manually analyse sites and give them rankings, as well as completing an SEO analysis to determine whether a site contains spam or not. Focusing on quality is therefore essential.
In Google's Rater Guidelines they look for content that is not just unique, but provides 'Unique Insights' on a topic. They're not just looking for unique words, but actual unique insight, i.e. a different approach or more in-depth analysis.
If your site is flagged as suspicious, Google are likely to assign someone to manually review it for spam.
Google attempt to determine the Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) of the author of a web page and this can be an important SEO ranking factor.
Google are currently putting together a 'Knowledge Vault' and plan on assigning sites a 'Knowledge Trust Score' based on how many factual mistakes their websites contain. They may not be able to measure accuracy yet, but it's likely they will in the future and that this will become an important SEO factor.
An average visitor spends under 15 seconds on the average web page. It's therefore essential that your content captures a visitor's attention in the first 15 seconds and continues to hold it.
Ask not what your users can do for you, ask what you can do for your users. Get into the mindset of providing truly useful information and putting your users first. If you do, a successful website will follow.
According to moz.com Domain Authority is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. It is far more accurate than PageRank and is regularly updated.
A high MOZ Trust indicates a site has a good number of links from trustworthy websites. It is an alternative way of measuring the quality of incoming links.
While Facebook profiles aren't visible to Google, dedicated company pages are, therefore having a regularly updated company page that links to your website is likely to help your ranking.
If you're looking to appear high in the Image Results give your image a keyword rich name (e.g. france-hotel.jpg, not 452342.jpg), add an ALT tag to it and place it on a page with other relevant content.
On an e-commerce site your categories are typically linked to in your main menus whereas individual products aren't. It's therefore best to write category descriptions for these landing pages, so they contain a healthy amount of unique content.
If safe search is on then adult content and pages with swear words won't appear. Avoid using these on professional websites.
For many local searches like trades, or where a city name is entered as part of a search string, a list of Google+ pages is often shown above the standard search results.
For pages that could potentially impact the future happiness, health, or wealth of users Google have additional guidelines. Page Quality is considerably more important.
For encyclopaedia pages expertise and accuracy are of particular importance, as is using external references.
For both the page as a whole and for a specific keyword, Google give a ranking boost to pages that receive a good click through rate. Write your Meta Titles, Descriptions and URLs carefully to encourage this!
If you're targeting a single country but have an international domain (e.g. .com, .net or .org) then you can use Google's International Targeting tool to say which country your website is aimed at.
Since Google's Vince Update bigger brands appear higher and are more likely to show multiple times on the first page for brand specific searches. This is one advantage of using a brand specific domain name rather than a keyword rich domain name.
Linking to all your most important landing pages from your main menu is a good SEO strategy. It's also important to cross-link relevant items, for instance if you have multiple products in each category, you could add a 'related products' block that links to 5 other products in the same category.
It's better for your website optimization if your blog is on the same domain as your main website, as otherwise links to it don't benefit your site. There should also be sufficient links between your blog and your site for the link juice to flow from one to the other.
Major CMS systems like Drupal and Wordpress have regular security releases and the more often you update security the less likely you are to get malware.
There are various algorithms that try and measure the 'trust' of a website, but building real trust with your clients will also help your SEO. Satisfied customers are more likely to recommend your site, link to it and share it, therefore good customer service also supports your SEO.
It may be impossible to design a site for 3D glasses, hologramatic projectors, or to know what technology or code will be invented, but there are things you can do to future-proof your website. Design it with a responsive theme, choose hosting that lets you easily upgrade and focus on creating great content and a beautiful design rather than obsessing about specific algorithms.
The Payday Loans algorithm update combats spam websites for searches like 'Payday Loan', hence the name.
The Google Hummingbird algorithm aims to establish the meaning behind searches and to look at synonyms and the overall sense of a question, rather than just keywords. It makes it less important to include multiple synonyms on a website; though using synonyms occasionally still helps.
Google Pigeon rewards sites for Local SEO that have their physical address shown on the site. It tries to determine whether someone is searching for a local service, store, etc. and to show more local companies in the search results.
Your average user is impatient and doesn't like to scroll down to see any content. Google's Page Layout Algorithm takes this into account and gives more credit to content near the top of the page and penalises sites that only show adverts when first opened.
Over 90% of people aged 50 and up need glasses or other visual aids and it's important that your font size is large enough to read easily. Google also measure the font size on mobile devices in their Mobile Friendly test.
Using keywords in the names of images will help those images appear higher for image searches and provide a small ranking boost to the page they appear on too.
Domains that include a keyword get a boost for that keyword, particularly Exact Match Domains (EMD's) where the domain is comprised solely of the keyword. Conversely there are also advantages to branding, for example 'Amazon.com' is more memorable than 'buybooks.com'.
Submitting a sitemap to Google tells them all the pages on your site and in which order you prioritize pages, which might mean they would choose one of your preferred pages over another, but they wouldn't show it higher in the search results itself. The larger the site, the more important a sitemap becomes.
If your whois information shows that you own spammy sites Google are more likely to look carefully at spam on this domain. Links from sites you own will also carry less SEO weight than links from third party sites.
When selecting keywords and writing content, remember to include niche and long-tail keywords - Keywords that are 3+ words and specific to your business. As voice activated search becomes more popular it's likely the average search length will increase.
Creating interesting content (like this interactive infographic) that you want people to link to is called 'link bait' and is a valid organic SEO strategy.
Having positive customer reviews in Google+ will give your Google+ page a boost and help with local SEO. There is also speculation that positive reviews elsewhere also help your SEO in general.
Including keywords in the ALT text (a short phrase describing an image) helps those images appear higher in image searches and the page appear higher for normal searches. Vary the ALT tags on different images.
If you change domain names it's essential to 301 (permanently redirect) or 302 (temporarily redirect) your old site to your new one. You can also gain benefit if other pages are 301 redirected to your site, provided they're relevant and natural. Since July 2016 you now keep 100% of the benefit of 301 and 302 redirects.
Having more links from websites in the same country you are targeting for local SEO as determined by the TLD (top level domain), international targeting or the address on the site will help your site rank better with Google in that country.
It's likely that Google will look for indicators of if a link is positive (e.g. a recommendation) or negative (e.g. a complaint) and factor that into their algorithm
Having a Keyword in the Meta Title of a page linking to yours will help your site appear higher for that keyword too.
Having your brand name mentioned and in particular having major news portals linking to your website will help your Google ranking.
Even if content doesn't link to you, having your brand name or domain mentioned on relevant websites with a high authority will help your SEO.
Links from relevant, quality directories help your SEO, but mass submitting your content to many directories can hinder it, therefore manual submissions with unique content are best.
In Google's Rater Guidelines they specify that one SEO factor is helpful supplementary content, e.g. menus linking to other relevant content on the site or extra blocks with relevant information or images.
Google updated this on 28 March 2016 to reduce the emphasis on supplementary content, therefore we've changed the priority from 'high' to 'medium'.
There should be one main H1 title per page of your website and ideally this will include a relevant keyword for that page.
A good SEO technique is to use the keyword early in the content, for example in the first menu on your website and in the first paragraph of text.
To show Google that your web page is all about the same keyword, don't just use keywords early on the page, also use them in the last 50 words on the page.
Very slow sites won't perform as well in the search results, particularly for mobile searches. Use a fast host and the Page Speed SEO Tool to make your site faster.
Google's Caffeine update means that having frequent updates on your site is good for your website SEO, particularly for time related searches (e.g. news, sports results, etc.)
Ordering the words on your page and in Metatags in the same order as people search for them is a good SEO technique, however this is less important than good spelling and grammar.
Including relevant outgoing links, particularly for articles or advice pages will help the SEO optimization of those pages.
Linking to relevant sources helps your website ranking, but excessive links, particularly with little other content can hinder it.
Linking out to related, high authority websites helps your website ranking, excessive links to irrelevant websites can hinder it.
Videos have the potential to go viral in a way that other content rarely does and therefore have huge potential to drive traffic to your site. Videos also help your Google SEO ranking, particularly when hosted on your server.
Internet Explorer has a 2083 character limit on URLs, so huge URLs won't display. Generally it's better for SEO to keep URLs shorter and to avoid too many trailing slashes. For large sites using category/keyword as the URL is a good strategy, as Google sometimes show categories in the search results too.
Including keywords in a URL (particularly the start of the URL) helps your website's SEO, however it's essential that the URLs on a site are varied. If every page is about holidays in France, only use holiday-france in the URL a handful of times on the most important pages, not on every page of the site!
Providing references in articles, particularly medical or financial articles helps your website ranking. For some types of content (e.g. an ecommerce page) it's not necessary.
Provided you filter out the spam, having more comments on your blog can help your search engine ranking as it increases the number of relevant words on the page. It's best to either prevent links in comments, or nofollow them, so you don't inadvertently link to spammy sites.
Google Hummingbird and Google RankBrain both look at the overall context of a site rather than just keywords to define what a page is about. Using synonyms and other related words, not just your keywords will therefore help your SEO.
The Flesch Reading Ease calculates how easy text is to read based on average words in a sentence and average syllables in a word. 60 to 80 is optimal.
This also calculates how easy text is to read and places more emphasis on average syllables in a word. Ironically www contains 9 syllables, so in theory including a web address will increase the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.
Google recommend separating URLs with hyphens rather than underscores, therefore online-fashion is better than onlinefashion or online_fashion.
A Google Patent (US 8140449 B1) suggests that they literally try and identify content that is boring and if articles are more descriptive, unique or unusual, reward them with higher rankings.
In early 2015 Google struck a firehose deal with Twitter that allows them to index Tweets faster. Since then it's likely that the number (and authority) of links from Tweets help your website ranking.
In 2013 Matt Cutts said "We like standards that are available on the open web. If we're not able to crawl something – like Facebook ... we don't want to depend on that data." Google therefore can't directly measure Likes or Shares from Facebook profiles, but they can measure traffic to a site by using Chrome or Analytics and it's likely that this plays a role.
If Tweets and other social signals include relevant keywords this will help your website ranking more.
If you identify links to your site that are clearly spammy, you can file a Reconsideration Request and ask Google to disavow (i.e. ignore) them. Look into this carefully before you do so and only disavow links you are certain are bad.
For specific queries Google considers timely, e.g. news, sports results, etc. it gives newer pages a significant ranking boost.
If you enter a single ambiguous word in Google, e.g. crane that could be the bird or the machine, it's likely that Google modify the normal algorithm to show search results that fit with different possible meanings. This may make single ambiguous words harder to rank for.
If an individual visits a specific website a lot, Google will move that site higher in the search results just for that person. If you're doing a keyword analysis, be sure to use an SEO tool, not just rely on your own search results.
For shopping searches, Google often show specific results of products for sale using their own e-commerce interface.
If you have PDFs on your website, then these can have Metatags added to them in the same way as a web page can, which helps them appear higher with search engines.
If a lot of visitors arrive at your site and leave immediately, without clicking any internal links then this will cause your site to drop in the search results.
Google can measure direct traffic using their Chrome browser and Analytics and they may give sites that receive direct traffic an SEO boost too. However visitors arrive at your site, it also helps you!
Dwell time, or how long visitors spend on your site is one way to measure how well you've captured their attention and how interesting your content is. If visit duration is high, you may well also get a website ranking boost.
Google's manual analysis guidelines mention that having a contact form is a positive factor. It's also important that your clients can contact you!
More pages on your site means you can target a wider range of keywords and provide more information, however it's essential that you provide unique content on each page, therefore as with everything SEO, quality is more important than quantity.
In 2010 Google added web page speed as a web search ranking factor and having a fast server will help your page speed.
Having the same Title or Description metatags on multiple pages is bad for your SEO as you're missing the opportunity to target multiple keywords and it's less likely that the Metatags are accurate.
Minimising your html, CSS and JavaScript makes your website load faster. There are lots of both manual and automated tools that assist with this and most major CMS systems like Wordpress and Drupal also have modules that assist you.
In 2014 Google said Disallowing crawling of JavaScript or CSS files in your site’s robots.txt directly harms how well our algorithms render and index your content and can result in suboptimal rankings.
Most companies choose to promote their website in print too, whether on a business card, brochures, posters, etc. Choosing a short, memorable domain name makes it easier to type and reduces the risk that people will arrive at a competitor's domain.
Adding social media buttons to your blog pages helps generate more likes and shares. Before adding links out to your Facebook or Twitter profiles though, ask yourself Do you want people to use them? Only link to them if they're updated regularly and add value.
Target the right audience. Are you targeting business executives or sports enthusiasts? Are you targeting children, or their parents? Keep your target audience in mind when designing the site and writing the content, don't try and please everyone.
There is some evidence that for large sites having breadcrumbs (links back to the parent categories) will improve your SEO.
Drop-down menus allow visitors to easily find links within categories without using up too much space and enhance the user-friendliness of large sites. Only include essential items in drop-down menus, to avoid overwhelming visitors.
Google can tell where photos are taken and it's possible that if you have a lot of city or landscape photos on your site from a different geographic region then it will be a negative factor for your local SEO.
If you're on a mobile device it can be frustrating when you're trying to click a link, but click the wrong one. This is caused by having too small a 'size tap' and it helps users and your SEO to have an appropriately large size tap on each link.
If a domain was first registered a long time ago, this gives it a small boost in the search results.
Having a keyword in your sub-domain can help that sub-domain appear higher. Using e.g. fr for France or de for Germany can also help tell visitors which country you're targeting.
Google may look at whether the site is a registered bricks and mortar organisation and give these sites a boost.
Ideally you should choose to forward one version of your site to the other, (example.com to www.example.com or vice-versa). This gives a small SEO benefit.
A common myth is that Google use the geographic location of a host to determine which country the site is targeting. This is untrue as Google use a myriad of other factors that make more sense! The host country is only important because it means that visitors from that country will be able to download your site a little faster.
Adding a hreflang tag to pages helps tell Google what language each page is in.
There is speculation that older links give you more link juice. Only ever delete old links if you're certain that they're spammy.
Another myth is that Google have a special rule for .edu and .gov domains. They don't! That said, these sites typically are more trustworthy and have higher domain authority, so natural links from them will always help.
Links in an 'About the author' section of an article or in the last paragraph of a page probably carry less weight than contextual links in the main body of the page.
You can add a title that appears when you hover over a link that may provide a small ranking benefit if used in moderation.
Nofollow links are normally ignored by Google, however there are exceptions, for example they have an algorithm that takes into account Tweets and other social media links.
It's best not to use a keyword in the anchor text excessively, however having a keyword near the anchor text is likely to give you a boost for that keyword.
Most forums add nofollow to outgoing links, or don't allow links from new accounts. Irrelevant links from forums, even nofollow links can also be classed as web spam. It's therefore better to only use forum posts when highly relevant and in moderation.
Google look for natural links to your site, therefore if all the incoming links are in your name, this will reduce their benefit. Links from varied authors with a good reputation (perhaps identified by links to Google+ accounts, numbers in circles, features on hub sites, etc.) may provide more benefit.
For a brand new website submitting it to the major search engines will help it to be indexed faster. You can also submit new URLs to Google and Bing to get individual pages indexed faster.
An ALT tag is a string of text added to an image that tells screen readers and search engines what it is. Including keywords in an ALT tag can give it a search ranking boost, particularly for image searches.
If you have duplicate content on your site you can use Canonical URLs to tell search engines which page to show in the results.
Validating your html to ensure it is compliant and displays correctly across different browsers is a good idea.
Breaking up a page so it's easier to read helps make it more user-friendly and may help your Google ranking too. One way to do this is with bullets or numbered lists.
Google often give very new content a boost. There's also positive correlation between search position and page age, where older pages perform better, however this may be because older pages tend to have more links going to them, so it may not be causal.
Including the occasional keyword in sub-headings (h1 - h6 titles) is a good idea for your Google ranking.
It may not help your search position, but having a call to action, e.g. a link to the contact form, a buy button or a download brochure button will help your sales.
Tags are a list of words that categorise each page, similar to hashtags in social media. They can help SEO if you use a limited number of tags, but having unlimited tags, particularly for a small site is likely to create many 'tag' pages that only have one or two items on them, which won't help users, or SEO.
Some SEO companies say that placing words in bold gives them more weight for SEO, though we've not found any studies that confirm this.
There is some evidence that links from the main menu, for example count for more than links from the footer of your site.
PageRank was a measure of the links going to a page, however in March 2016 Google officially declared that they have removed it. It's been replaced by Trust Flow, Domain Authority and other more accurate measures.
Google are likely to take other social media likes and shares into account, however most SEO experts agree that other than the largest 4 or 5 social media channels these won't play much of a role in SEO, though they may still generate traffic in their own right.
Include #hashtags on relevant Tweets and in other social media will help raise more awareness and drive more traffic to your site. For some Google searches the #hashtag page appears in the top 10 and if you find this for a relevant keyword, Tweet with that #hashtag.
In 2014 Google announced that secure sites with SSL Certificates had become a minor element in ranking. Self-signed SSL Certificates don't count.
In Google's Rater Guidelines they state that having Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy pages are both good for SEO.
In Google's Rater Guidelines they specify that an 'About Us' page is a positive factor. It's also something that visitors are likely to look for.
Including a keyword in an email address might help a page rank higher for that particular keyword.
Many people expect that if they click the logo or header they will go to the home page, so linking it is a basic strategy to make a site more user-friendly. Using a keyword rich ALT tag on the logo might also improve your SEO.
A common myth is that if you register your domain name for say 10 years, this gives you an SEO benefit over if you register it for say 1 year. Google have confirmed it makes no difference.
Other search engines may consider it in their rankings, but Google ignores the Keyword Metatag. This does NOT mean keywords as a whole are unimportant. It does NOT mean that they ignore other Metatags. Just that they ignore the Keyword Metatag.
In April 2016 Google confirmed that code to text ratio (i.e. the content that's visible on the page compared to the amount of code needed to put it there) is not a factor they look at.
It's still worth removing superfluous html on the page as this will make it load faster, but in itself, it's another SEO myth.
It can be tempting to incorporate text into an image when you want fancy fonts or writing over a background image, however this makes it harder for Google to read the text and should be done sparingly. Instead add text over images using CSS or add the font to your website using a tool like Drupal's Font Your Face module.
Google penalise sites that are Top Heavy with adverts or have an excessive number of popups or other annoying advertising. On 10 January 2017, they also implemented a penalty against sites with annoying pop-ups on mobile devices.
A 500 Server Error means your browser can't reach your server. Talk to your host and fix this problem.
One way to control the language is to use cookies but keep the URL the same. Don't do it! Google doesn't use cookies and this means that it is literally impossible for them to index the multilingual versions of a page and they will only index it in one language. It's OK to use cookies to control some elements, but not the language - unless you also use a different URL.
If 2 websites have the same C-Class IP address, it's one signal that will tell Google the sites are related. If they're obviously related (e.g. having a multilingual site with 7 different domains, one for each language) that's fine, but if not, excessive links from the same C-Class IPs might be a sign of manipulative SEO.
Using automated programs that add links, doing bulk link exchange schemes, submitting the same article to dozens of websites and other similar practices that manipulate SEO in a deceptive manner will get your site penalised. A good ground rule when creating a link is to ask yourself If SEO didn't exist, would this link still make sense? If yes, it's more likely to help with SEO too.
Sponsored links whether paid for by cash or by a gift (e.g. flowers) should have the nofollow tag added to them to tell search engines to ignore them, otherwise they may be considered manipulative. One famous example of this is the SEO penalty Interflora received in 2013.
If every page of another website links to yours, Google will normally only count it as one link. If several sites do this and the links seem irrelevant, Google may penalise you for it.
Reciprocal links (where someone links to you and you link back) are normally just treated as two separate one way links; however excessive reciprocal links will reduce your SEO ranking.
Having the same content on multiple pages of your site could be seen as black hat SEO (e.g. having the same content on multiple pages and just changing the name of the city). Sometimes it's natural (e.g. ecommerce search results) in which case you can use canonical URLs to tell Google which page to show in the results.
Only use Flash if you absolutely have to. It isn't mobile friendly and is typically bad for SEO. Certainly slideshows etc. are all better created by using other tools.
It's worth doing an SEO analysis and checking for broken internal and external links. These can be fixed either by fixing the links themselves, or for internal links, 301 redirecting the pages they arrive at to the correct page.
A noindex tag tells search engines to not show a page in the search results. This is fine to add to confidential pages, but ensure you don't accidentally noindex important pages!
Just as paying for incoming links to your site might get your site penalised, selling links from your site can also get you penalised.
There's a myth that adding rel=nofollow on internal links to unimportant pages helps your website rank higher. It doesn't, it may even hurt it.
Google only show around 55-60 characters in Meta Titles and around 155 characters in Meta Descriptions. Using long Meta Titles reduces the benefit of the keywords in them and if they're excessively long, may be considered spam.
Mystery meat navigation is where you use shapes or images for links that are unrelated to the desired location, or only show text when you hover over something. It's utterly non-user friendly and creates impossible to navigate sites.
Linking to unethical sites, illegal sites or penalised sites can get your own site penalised.
Redirecting a visitor to a different URL in a deceptive manner (e.g. forwarding them to a spam site) is a violation of Google's guidelines.
Using keywords in the anchor texts of all the incoming links to a site (even if the keywords vary considerably) is still considered keyword stuffing.
Repeating text on a website (e.g. Looking for a London hotel, luxury hotel in London or a 5 star hotel in London?) is considered keyword stuffing. Best avoid it!
Auto-generated content, including adding multilingual versions of a site that have been translated using automatic tools will get your site penalised.
The more poor quality links to your site vs. high quality links the less well you will rank.
Using link farms, having links from irrelevant pages, having only links of one type or other 'unnatural links' could all get your site penalised.
In addition to algorithmic penalties, Google can manually penalise a website for a range of reasons. If they have, it will appear in your Webmaster Tools report and the solution will depend on the type of penalty.
If Google suspects you of spamming, one patent reveals that they may jump your site around in the search results to see how you respond. This is called the 'Google Dance'.
Link schemes where you add links to your site in exchange for links back, have a link added to the footer of multiple sites, etc. etc. could all get your site penalised.
If someone has copied your site (called a 'Scraper Site') there's a possibility it will rank above your own site. If this happens, report it to Google and take legal action to take the other website down.
Cloaking - Showing visitors one thing and search engines another is a clear violation of Google's guidelines.
Having hidden text (0px sized fonts, colour the same as the background, etc.) can get your site penalised.
Having links with no anchor text or tiny images that link to something might be considered a hidden link and put your site in the spam category. This is true for both internal and external links.
If you infringe someone's copyright and they report it to Google, you may be removed from the search results. Even if it's not reported, it's likely to be identified as duplicate content and can still cause problems.
Sometimes another website might pretend to be yours to steal bank details or other information. This is called phishing and if it happens, report them to Google and take legal action.
If a site is down no-one can use it, so that's obviously bad for SEO, however it's likely if a site is down regularly it also moves down the search engine rankings.
If your site is infected by Malware it's clearly not good and needs resolving as a priority.
Affiliate sites are harder to rank than other sites as Google doesn't like duplicate content and many affiliate sites have the same content. Google's guidelines say Ask yourself why a user would want to visit your site first rather than visiting the original merchant directly. To rank well you must offer something different.
A 404 error message appears when a page isn't there, perhaps because it's been deleted, or a wrong URL has appeared in a link. The easiest solution is to 301 redirect them to another, related page.
Having a splash home page (e.g. a page with one large image and the words 'Enter Site' but no other content) is bad SEO as there's too little content to optimize. Visitors also tend not to like it.
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