The Worst thing for your site

[lovemark]

What is worse for a website for search engines?
1- Dead links on your page to pages that no longer exist.
2- Duplicate content
3- Meaningless subdirectories, such as mydomain/m-sec-pg.html
instead of mydomain/my-second-page.html
4- No keywords in <meta>
5- Bad choice of <tittle>
6- Not submitting sitemap to google
7- Something else

Please feel free to comment on any of the above.
Any tips you may give will be appreciated by me and other members too, I am sure.
Thanks!

[raj7]

Hi,

The best thing for your site is fresh relevant content. I guess the opposite of that is the worst.

Raj

[marketraise001]

Exactly by adding fresh content to your website on a regular basis you make it Search engine friendly.Search Spiders love fresh content and crawls them at once.If you steal content then Google terms your pages or website to be palguarized (PLR) and your website is banned from Google or any other major search engine.

[bartholomew]

numbers 1, 2 and 5 are the ones i would fix first.

the others strike me less crucial.

[inertia]

Duplicate content is definitely the worst! Its the only one on your list that can really mess things up! Forever!!!!!

Also keyword stuffing, hidden text - all of that sort of stuff is really bad!

But....Does anyone ever come across very spammy sites which do really well? For example i started SEO work last week on a site that had huge paragraphs of hidden, keyword stuffed text. But this site did really well in the SERPs. Surely the search engines should have picked it up? Any explanations would be read with interest...

[bartholomew]

Duplicate content is definitely the worst! Its the only one on your list that can really mess things up! Forever!!!!!

Also keyword stuffing, hidden text - all of that sort of stuff is really bad!

But....Does anyone ever come across very spammy sites which do really well? For example i started SEO work last week on a site that had huge paragraphs of hidden, keyword stuffed text. But this site did really well in the SERPs. Surely the search engines should have picked it up? Any explanations would be read with interest...

LOL, spammy sites come and go in the SERPs, but there are always some baffling ones that don't deserve being in. and reporting spam to engines does not usually result in a ban or penalty. rather they claim that they use complaints as pointers to what they should tweak in algorithm!

duplicate content is not usually an unfixable disaster. in fact, I think maybe it is handled better than used to be. now duplicate content usually mean only one version indexed or ranked if it is identified as dupe. in days gone by I seen problems that seemed to me like actual duplicate penalties. I don't see that penalising happen to people in last year or more, only filtering.

[erikko]

What is worse for a website for search engines?
1- Dead links on your page to pages that no longer exist.
2- Duplicate content
4- No keywords in <meta>

this three are the main problems SEO's encounters and needs attention

[bartholomew]

this three are the main problems SEO's encounters and needs attention

keywords meta? a main problem? many years ago, perhaps, but certainly not these days for Google. Maybe a little more for Y! and MSN, but not for the big fish.
if you had said no keywords in the TITLE is a problem then you would have been on to something.

[mjtaylor]

Yep, there are lots of spammy sites in the index ... and you can do something about it ... for years there was a site that was just awful and spammy in my niche ... but it had SO many backlinks and so much on page spam that it was in the top ten all over the niche ... everyone hated it and couldn't understand why it was there ... and I used G's "disatisfied with these results" feedback feature and, well, it took a while, but the site is nowhere to be found these days ...

Duplicate content and not optimizing the title tag would be my top two of your list. Broken links right behind those ... 3, 4 & 6 are relatively meaningless.

I can't agree with the opposite of fresh, relevant content as being the worst, because while a site needs relevant content, it does not need to be fresh. If you have the right content when you first put up a site it can rise to the top and stay there without any change in content.

JMO, MJ

[bartholomew]

Yep, there are lots of spammy sites in the index ... and you can do something about it ... for years there was a site that was just awful and spammy in my niche ... but it had SO many backlinks and so much on page spam that it was in the top ten all over the niche ... everyone hated it and couldn't understand why it was there ... and I used G's "disatisfied with these results" feedback feature and, well, it took a while, but the site is nowhere to be found these days ...

how sure are you that your feedback is made the difference, MJ? after all, there is always a lot going on, no?