3 Of The Things Google Dislikes Most And What To Do About Them

by Liz Seyi Digital marketing manager

With Google continuing to dominate the search engine stratosphere – recent statistics indicating that it still enjoys a global market share of more than 90% against such supposed competitors as Bing and Yahoo! – you will naturally want to do everything possible to delight Google with your brand’s online presence.

That’s what our own SEO optimisation services here at PENNInk Productions are so geared towards ensuring. But that doesn’t mean you should just sit back and allow your chosen digital marketing agency to concern itself with everything. After all, it pays to be educated on what Google loves and hates as a search engine, so that you can make the most informed decisions on every aspect of your organisation’s activities online.

In that spirit, let’s pick out three things that might currently be hampering your chances of strong Google search rankings and the steps you can take to address them.

A poor user experience

What business is it of Google’s if you give your users a so-so experience once they’re actually on your site? After all, you’ve used the right keywords to attract the most appropriate target audiences, right?

The fact is, a site’s user experience is exceedingly important to Google, on the basis that it wants to give those using its search engine the best possible experience overall. If your site is slow to load, then, or cumbersome to navigate, they won’t be getting that best possible experience. So, you can expect your Google rankings to suffer accordingly.

Are there things you can do about that? Yes, plenty; Google provides its own tools, such as PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals reports, to help website owners establish exactly what might be going wrong with their sites right now, and what they can do to start fixing those issues.

Low-quality traffic

Again, this is something that you might think isn’t really Google’s business. But by “low-quality traffic”, we are referring to traffic coming to your site through ‘spammy’ sources, such as link farms. That’s as opposed to the high-quality traffic that would come to your site via authoritative sources of relevance to your industry and target market (for example, a trusted blog reporting the latest news about your sector or local area).

After all, think about it: if there are a lot of links to your site from well-respected sites in your sector of the economy, this suggests your site is trusted by the right people, and therefore likelier to provide human users performing a search with the content they need.

A high volume of links to your site from less-than-reputable sources, though, suggests the opposite of the above – that you are dependent on low-quality sources for your backlinks. It also implies that you might have even tried to ‘game the system’ to acquire backlinks, with narrow SEO considerations rather than genuine usefulness and relevance having been your greatest priority.

And such less-than-pretty circumstances and cynical motivations won’t do much to convince Google to actually give your site high search engine rankings.

Content that doesn’t really help anyone

Whatever sector your organisation is active in, a consistent imperative is to provide content that will be genuinely helpful to the human users you should be targeting with your brand’s search engine optimisation efforts.

That means you’ll have to go well beyond simply incorporating the ‘right’ keywords into your content; you will also need to go into greater depth on the subjects that you do explore in your content.

Whether you use the dedicated tools that are available on the market to help website owners identity potential related terms and subtopics, or you look at what your highest-ranked competitors are producing content about, it is crucial to create online content that feels rich and relevant.

Attracting the highest possible rankings in Google for your brand will go a long way to helping it survive and thrive in the months and years ahead. Get in touch with PENNInk Productions about our SEO optimisation services, and we will get talking to you about the solutions we can provide to help drive up your firm’s search engine rankings – and keep them up – for relevant terms.