No matter how much you work on your site, there can always be things that threaten to do harm to it. Malware, changing circumstances or SEO rules, unintended infringements upon rules you might not have been aware of…all these things can do harm to your site and your business, and potentially lower your SEO ranking. Worse yet, they can drive people away from your business.

The good news is that if you stay alert to potential problems and familiarize yourself with what you need to do to avoid them, Let’s take a look at what some of these things are and how you can avoid them.

Duplicate content

Your content can be extremely well written and incorporate all of the necessary keywords to speak to your target audience. However, if you repeat yourself more than is necessary to get your message across, this will result in your site being downgraded. 

Every company wants to share its message enthusiastically. This is understandable, but you should also understand how to be brief. In order to eliminate duplicate content, go through your site and make a list of the major points you want to get across. Go through it again and see if any of those points are repeated. If so, you should think about changing or eliminating them.

Bad links or backlinks

Even if you fill your sites with links to quality sites that should appeal to your site viewers, there might be problems with them, or the backlinks leading from other sites to yours that you might need to get rid of. 

Links can go bad for different reasons: The sites that you link yours to might go down, become affected by malware, or the companies themselves might go out of business suddenly. And there is also the issue of backlinks that lead from other sites to yours. If this happens, it will not only confuse your site visitors, but it will downgrade your site’s ranking, as well.

You can use a broken link checker to assess all of your site’s links and backlinks. Then you can take action on eliminating them, or – in the case of backlinks – “disavowing” them so that your company isn’t associated with anything corrupted.

Copyright issues

If you want to reference another company, be sure you are familiar with that company’s rules regarding copyright. There are actual laws associated with copyright violation, so if you accidentally infringe upon another company’s protected information, it will not only downgrade your site but also constitute a legal violation.

The most obvious way to avoid this is to simply not copy other people’s material. It can sometimes happen that you unintentionally use material that belongs to someone else and don’t realize it. Or, in the case of certain types of media, you can actually use parts of things (images, for example) in some cases and not commit copyright infringement. 

If you’re still not sure, you should check with Google. As part of your overall site auditing/maintenance, look up your site in the Google Transparency Report. It will show you any issues that you have that should be removed from your site.

Failing to stay up-to-date with Google

Remember that Google adjusts its rules and rating mechanisms on a regular basis. In order to keep your ranking high all the time, it is a good idea to go back and review the criteria regularly. 

Google has a site called the Google Webmasters’ Blog. You can look at it at any time and see what updates are being made to the criteria. 

Failing to optimize across devices

Remember that not all platforms are the same! A very common problem with websites is the failure to optimize across devices. Webmasters often do a great job of creating an optimized, fully-functioning site on a PC or Mac, and then the same site has problems on other devices. Mobile devices in particular can be problematic. Interfaces can vary from one to the other, buttons can be ineffective (this can be particularly problematic if you’re trying to sell goods online), etc.

To prevent cross-device issues, be sure to test all the possible devices that your site might run on during the process of creation. Also, you should repeat these tests whenever you make updates or changes. If customers start to become frustrated with the inability to navigate, they will surely turn their attention elsewhere.

Check regularly to prevent issues from arising

All of these problems are easily preventable. You just need to remain organized and diligent about keeping up with them on a regular basis. Make a maintenance schedule for yourself so that you don’t forget. If you do it right, you should be able to run through the steps easily and stay on top of your game.

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