These search engine rankings needs a very vast analysis as some of the blogs or sites are not having their search engine rankings even for their own brand name and so on. This is due to the lack of any strong SEO or might be because of having poor SEO on their blog. Below are those 5 points I found out which might affect your search engine rankings. I hope they will be helpful to you.
Read my other SEO articles in my SEO Tips Category.
1. Your robots.txt File
This file is a file where you can define whether you want to allow search engines to crawl your pages or not. Goto yourdomain.com and check to see if you are disallowing certain directories or post or an entire site. No matter how strong your SEO is, if you are stopping search engine crawlers to index your site, then you might end up getting your site blocked from those engines.2. Your Navigation
Double check if your navigation across all the pages of your website is good. If you are having flash or more Java-scripts for your links then you might have less chances of getting those interior pages indexed.Above all, your site pages must be easy to navigate and should not take more than 3 clicks to reach to the original content as said by some SEO masters.
3. Your Domain Age
If your website is newly launched with some very few content then you have some high chances of getting your site be in Google Sandbox which is a trial period where Google suppresses your rankings to qualify your site as credible. This is a place where your site might take 5-6 months to come out from or maybe less or maybe more but that depends on your site management.Don’t feel discouraged if your site don’t get higher rankings,just put your efforts in gaining valuable inbound links and creating quality content and you will have no problems once you get out of the sandbox.
4. Penalties by Search Engines
If you use some black hat SEO tricks to get outbound links or some instant backlinks then it is quite possible that you could be penalized. This case is very unlikely unless you are using those black hat techniques to get someinstant result or traffic for your site. You must check for the following points :
- Content duplication
- Mirror sites
- Cloaking
- Keyword Stuffing
- Hidden text or links
5. Your Hosting Provider
This final point is very least effective and it happens in a very rare case. This is for those who are having many other sites on the same server where your own site is hosted. So, having a personalized server is much preferred rather than having a shared hosting with some bunch of other websites.You may use reverse ip lookup tool if you want to check which other websites are hosted on your server. But this point hardly matters for a low traffic website so it can be neglected.