If you have invested a lot of money in local SEO Sydney, it is essential to know a few things that could harm your SEO. If your website’s rankings are going the wrong way then you need to do something about it. You should learn about the factors that could have had a negative impact on your rankings.

Creating low-quality backlinks for your website

Any link purchased or created with the intention of manipulating rankings that can directly impact the ranking of a site in search results is a low-quality link and should be avoided. Low-quality links from blacklisted or low-quality web directors, spam comments, low-quality guest posts, and similar platforms can harm your SEO.

Your website has bad redirects

Redirects happen when visitors open a URL and the link takes them to a different site. Developers may redirect URLs to a different site due to changes in website design. However, a redirect is a bad one if it doesn’t fulfil the intention of the user. The user could be looking for men’s shoes but the redirect takes them to a site that talks about governance. That is a bad redirect and can hurt your SEO.

Your website has duplicate content

Duplicate content is the substantive blocks of content across or within domains that either match other content or are similar. If you recently updated your content and a substantial amount of content on your website is duplicated, tell your SEO agency to work on it because it will negatively affect the rankings of your site.

You recently updated your Meta tags and title

The title tag is very important when it comes to on-page SEO because it allows google to understand the contents of your web page. Hence, even a slight change in the tag might cause ranking fluctuations. E.g., if the title tag of your page is “SEO Company in Sydney” then your ranking might be affected for keywords such as “SEO services in Sydney” because you just removed the word company from the title tag of the page.

You recently made changes to your content

There might be a sudden change or drop in rankings after making some changes to your content. Content is an essential ranking factor. All pages rank based on your content. If you make changes to your content, it will affect your rankings. However, this may be temporary until search engines adjust to the new content.

Incorrectly used robots.txt file

Webmasters ignore some important issues that have a big impact on your rankings. These issues are the incorrect usage of the robots.txt file, noindex tag and nofollow attribute. Your web developer may mistakenly apply a noindex tag in your important web pages ranking highly and this could result in the webpage disappearing from the ranking. This can also happen where a single line of the code might block search engines in robots.txt from indexing your website and could harm the rankings of your site. You should check this and ensure you get back your local SEO Sydney rankings.