What is Negative Ranking Factors | how does it affect our ranking

Negative Ranking Factors

are things you can do that harm your existing rankings. These factors fit into three categories: accessibility, devaluations, and penalties.Accessibility issues are just stumbling points for Googlebot that could prevent your site being crawled or analyzed properly. A devaluation is an indicator of a lower quality website and may prevent yours from getting ahead. A penalty is far more serious, and may have a devastating effect on your long-term performance in Google. Once again, on-page factors are those that are under your direct control as a part of the direct management of your website.

· High Body Keyword Density

Keyword Stuffing penalties arise when abusing a once extremely effective tactic: sculpting Keyword Density to a high level. Our own experiments have shown that penalties can happen as early as 6% density, though TF-IDF is likely at play and this is sensitive to topics, word types, and context.

· Keyword Dilution

This factor manifests itself from logic: if a higher Keyword Density or TF-IDF is positive, at some point, a total lack of frequency/density will decrease relevance. As Google has improved at understanding natural language, this may be better described as Subject Matter Dilution: writing content that wanders without any clear theme. The same basic concept is at play either way.

· Keyword-Dense Title Tag

Aside from a page as a whole, Keyword Stuffing penalties appear to be possible within the title tag. An ideal title tag should definitely be less than 60-70 characters and hopefully still provide enough value to function as a good search ad in Google's results. At absolute minimum, there is no benefit in using the same keyword five times in the same tag.

· Exceedingly Long Title Tag

· Keyword-Dense Heading Tags

Heading Tags, such as H1, H2, H3, etc. can add additional weight to certain words. Those attempting to abuse this positive ranking factor will find that they can't simply cram as many keywords as they can into these tags, even if the tags themselves grow to be no lengthier than usual. Keyword Stuffing penalties appear to be possible simply as a function of the total space within these tags.

· Heading Tag (H1, H2, etc.) Overuse

As a general rule, if you want a concrete answer of whether or not an SEO penalty exists, try pushing a positive ranking factor well beyond what seems sane. One easily verified penalty involves placing your entire website in an H1 tag. Too lazy for that? Matt Cutts drops a less-than-subtle hint about too much text in an H1 in this source.