I was looking at search-ranking-factors at SEOmoz.org and they not only have made a very good list to look for Search Engine Optimization factors.
They also have a list of negative factors and there is a top five of negative factors.
Here is the short list:
- Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
- Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
- External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
- Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
- Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming)
Looking at these factors its easy to see where thing go wrong in a standard installation of Joomla (before version 1.5)
Duplicate Content
First one is the Content similar to Duplicate or Existing in the Index:
This is because in a standard installation there are version in the standard HTML, PDF versions and print versions of each page of your website.
To prevent this, you should disable this functions in your Global Configuration under Content, disable the PDF and Print buttons.
Duplicate Title and or Meta Tags on Many Pages
All tough the Duplicate Title will not that easily happen, the Meta Tags can be a problem.
If you use the standard Metadata fields in the Global configuration you could really have a problem with this.
These value’s are given to each page in your website…
Even if you use the separate Fields of each page to give a separate description and keywords!
You can simple check this if your site is indexed by Google, just do a search in Google like site:www.example.com and see what is in the description fields.. it might surprise you.
The best way to prevent this is to leave your Metadata fields empty and fill your page Descriptions and Keywords.
Even if you don’t wont to use that, leave all fields blank and let the search engines take the excerpts from your pages.
Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming)
I wrote a post about this problem a while ago Joomla and Keyword stuffing and its of course related to the same problem as the one above.
The simple solution is to leave the Global Metadata fields blank.
Because Joomla will ADD the meta keywords to the list of keywords in your Global configuration.
You could install the free SEF patch from Joomlatwork.com to overcome some of these problems.
With the solutions used to prevent the above you can overcome some of the Negative Ranking Factors.
All it takes are some simple configuration changes and empty the Global Metadata fields, so make sure you don’t let your website fall into the Top 5 factors…
I use SEOMOZ as a great resource when it comes to researching seo. Great post!
I’m relativley new to the blogging scene, and your blog. I just recently stumbled on your blog. Anyways, I’m trying my hardest to make my blog successful and market myself. So if you don’t mind dropping by http://www.randlife.com and just check some things out. I’ve subscribed to your feed, hopefully you will do the same. Keep up the great work! I’m going to be coming back alot!
@Randall,
Thank you for your comment, just left a comment on your Blog on the WordPress SEO Post…
I recently stumbled accross the following website: http://www.joomlacmssolutions.com which is offering all kinds of joomla services, templates and products. Has anyone out there tried their templates and can show me outcome. I really like what they are doing. I contacted them and they are just about to launch as a ecommerce site so maybe someone out there has tried their templates?
@ Shannon
“Stumbled accross”? I don’t hope so… as you and Carlos are doing a fine Job looking at your portfolio…
Please check some of the Portfolio URLs if they are still working!
And you need to do some work on your SEO and SEF as this Blog is all about that, so I hope you don’t mind pointing this out to you :-)
So for an upcoming Joomla Service Website like yours I won’t spam the comment and I will be watching your ecommerce site launch..
Succes to you and your partner!
thanks allot , but i want to ask you i have small website and i want to change it to ->
wordpress self hosted , or to joomla which one do you advice me to use .
for my small website http://www.mjaflaam.com
all visitors on my website come from search engines . so your ,great article freek me out from using joomla.
thanks
@Jasser: Looking at your site and topics, I suggest you use WordPress, that will be the closest to your site as it is today.
I fixed the meta tags/descriptions on my site since Google said there were 640 pages with duplicate meta tags/descriptions(I didn’t think about it being bad..).
But will Google start reindexing those pages to clear up the issues?
Or what is the next step to get Google to recognize that I changed those around?
@Raptorak: Google will tkae the new descriptions after it reindexes the site. If you wan to see how Google is indexing your site, please use the Webmaster console, you can reach that via the “about” link from the Google page.
You need agmail account to login.
I am trying to optimise http://www.tapijtnet.nl and indeed i have problems with duplicate metatags. Isn’t it possible somehow to use the the first 250 words of the article?
@Peter: You have a lot more problems with this site then just the duplicate metatags…
Check you site in Google with the search phrase site:www.tapijtnet.nl and then browse to page 4 an 5 of the results ther you will find some spam links within your site to pharmacy products.
Here is some info I wrote a few weeks ago http://blog.hummerbie.com/losing-google-yahoo-msn-traffic/
So check your site first to see if there are strange signs and odd behavior of the statics, also check the index.php file, ther should be no 64 bits encoded scripts in there.
Also, and this is even more important, clean the Meta tag fields, both Description and keywords form the global configuration.
You should also use the Joomla SEO patch of Joomlatwork.com which gives you the posibility to change you menu item titels to an HTML Title like “Creatief met Tapijt” to “Creatieve mogelijkheden en ideen met tapijt voor sfeer en stijl”.
“Creatief met Tapijt” sounds more like a Hobby project creating stuff from carpets instead of luring in new visitors who are looking for carpets.
P.s. Yep, Ik ben een Nederlander… ook webmaster van http://www.itmentor.nl en http://www.hummerbie.nl, wil je meer weten, stuur me nog even een mail.