- There are things on your website
that are sabotaging your Google rankings and traffic.
No matter how much effort you put into writing content,
optimize your technical SEO, building backlinks,
they're going to keep you down.
Hi everyone, I'm Neil Patel.
And today I'm going to teach you eight things
that you need to remove from your website immediately
if you want to rank better on Google.
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The first is outdated content.
Look, I've been doing SEO for a long time,
and this doesn't come as a shock
and you probably know this.
Google prefers fresh content.
According to Hosting Tribunal,
there are over 1.7 billion websites in the world.
Over two million blog posts
are being published every single day.
Not only that, it's estimated that Google
has over 63 billion pages indexed
according to WorldWideWebSize.
So instead of you thinking,
hey, I need to crank out a lot of content
each and every single day,
what I want you to do is go to Google Search Console
and look at all your pieces of content
and the amount of traffic you're getting.
Now in the date picker in Google Search Console,
I want you to compare what your traffic was like now
versus the same time a year ago.
You may get more traffic or less traffic,
but what you'll find is some pages
were doing well and aren't anymore.
I want you to look at those pages that were doing well
and go and update them.
And by refreshing up, making them better,
you're going to rank much better versus
taking your old content and just leaving it there.
Google wants all the content on your site
to be great and updated
because it's not just one page ranking on its own,
it's your whole site.
Google is looking at your whole site as a whole,
and when it's all buttoned up and perfect,
you're going to do much better.
The second thing that's hurting you
is pages with thin content.
Back in the day, 500-word page
was considered long-form content.
That was six years ago.
Today pages that don't go above and beyond
and really dig deep won't do well.
For that reason,
Google tends not to rank pages with thin content.
Now, if you can answer someone's question or query, right,
whatever someone is searching for is usually a problem,
in 200 words or 100 words, that's great,
but most people can't.
These pages that offer little to no value don't do well.
So what I want you to do is go to all the pages
that offer little to no value, look at them.
If you think they offer value, that's fine.
But if you don't, I want you to either
A, update them and make them more in-depth,
or B, 301 redirect them to other better pages
that are more in-depth
and offer a much better user experience.
Make sure you assess each and every single page
through Google Analytics.
Look at how much traffic it's getting
before the change and after the change.
Look at the bounce rate, look at the time on page.
These will all give you indicators
if that page is good or bad or needs updating.
The third thing that's hurting you,
excessive or irrelevant ads.
Look, when you put a lot of ads on your website,
all it's doing is increasing the load time.
The more ads you put on your website,
the more external resources that need to be loaded
which will have a direct impact
on your load time and your SEO.
Ads make users leave a website
if it impacts user experience.
Just imagine yourself pulling up a site on a mobile device
and all you're seeing is a ton of ads.
Even if it loads fast,
it's hindering the user experience.
So it's not bad to have ads,
even Google has ads,
but you want to make sure that they blend in,
they're nice, they're not too crazy in how they look,
and they're not distracting the user.
And if you look at what Google is doing with their ads,
that's a perfect example of how ideal you want to blend ads
throughout your own webpage.
The next thing that's hurting you
is automatically generated content.
Now this probably doesn't come as a shocker,
but Google wants you to deliver amazing experience.
Creating content through automated tools
is not going to deliver the best experience.
Even if you put in the time and effort
to make that content a bit more customized
and look personalized,
it's still not going to do well.
What you need to do is create content
that provides the best experience out there
and not just from the perspective that is not automated,
but you need to look for all the other pages
that are ranking for the term that you're going after,
and be like, hmm, is my content
going to provide more value than theirs?
And if you're unsure on how to evaluate that,
go to Ubersuggest,
type in the keyword that you're looking for
to rank for and write about.
In the right side you'll see
all the pages that rank on the top,
the backlinks they have,
the social shares, and their domain score.
This will give you a good understanding
of what users like as well as what Google likes,
because just because a site ranks number one
or a page ranks number one,
it's not always what users prefer.
So having that social data and backlinking data
will also give you a good understanding
of what a good page is,
and you can use that to come up with the best variation
that's better than all your competitors.
The next thing you need to stop doing
is intrusive popups or interstitials.
Look, Google even said this
on their Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.
They said "Pages that show intrusive interstitials
"provide a poorer experience to users
"than other pages where content is immediately accessible."
Now that doesn't mean that you can't do popups, I use them,
but typically you want to save the popups as an exit popup.
So an exit popup is upon leaving,
that's what people see versus upon entering.
And what you can do is if you have lead magnets
is you can promote it within your content,
a top of article, a bottom of article.
It's still a way to collect leads
without being intrusive.
Other things that you can do is inline opt-in boxes,
ribbons, top bars like hello bars, in-text call to actions.
These are all ways to drive more leads to the pages you want
without doing crazy popups upon first entry.
The next thing that's hurting you,
irrelevant internal links.
Everyone knows that internal linking is important,
but when you overdo it,
it's not only going to lose value
but it actually harms your SEO.
You have to do it in a very careful manner
that's best for users.
If it doesn't help users, don't do it.
So you want to make sure that you're choosing
internal links that are relevant
to the content and the page that people are going to read.
Don't just have tons of rich anchor text,
don't just have a ton of random anchor text,
do what's best for the user.
The next thing that's hurting you is duplicate content.
Now, this won't necessarily generate
any form of penalty from Google,
and they've even mentioned
how they don't penalize for duplicate content,
but they're not going to rank duplicate content
over original content.
So you want to make sure
that you're publishing new unique content.
Now this doesn't mean that you can cite sources
or take stats from other places and cite your sources
or take quotes from other people and give them credit.
It just means that your content has to be new and fresh.
And when I'm talking about duplicate content,
I'm not just talking about word for word
plagiarizing what someone else has already written,
I'm also talking about writing the same piece of content
that's been beaten to death a thousand times.
How many pieces of content do we need to have
on banana nutrition facts?
There's so many banana nutrition facts articles out there
and they all talk about the same thing.
Creating another one even if it's unique
and you didn't plagiarize word for word,
it's not going to add any value
and you're going to have a tough time ranking on Google.
Next, backlinks to spammy websites and domain names.
When you link out to other spammy sites,
you can get caught up
in what Google calls a link scheme, right?
A lot of times people are like,
hey I'll link to you if you link to me.
Doing these kind of things is called reciprocal linking.
It can hurt your rankings in the long run.
You should only be linking to pages that make sense.
It's not about hey should I no follow this link?
Should I do follow it?
I want to keep all the SEO juice to myself.
It's about providing the best user experience.
If you link to something
and you think it provides value to a user,
then link to it.
If you feel that, hey,
this link isn't going to provide any value
but I just want to link to it for the sake of it
because they're paying me money, don't do it.
Or if you want to take the money,
make sure you no follow that link or market as paid
and clearly let the user know
that you're paid for it as well.
If you need help with your SEO,
your rankings aren't climbing,
you're not sure what to do,
check out my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital.
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Thank you for watching.