Which SEO Characteristics Correlate With Lower Rankings? A SEO Philadelphia Companys Take on Googles Negative Ranking Factors

Much time is spent discussing Google’s positive ranking factors (for instance, recently the correlation between social media “likes” and “shares” and higher rankings) but it’s always interesting to consider which negative factors contribute to a website’s rankings. As a SEO Philadelphia company, we’d like to share the following negative ranking factors of Google (specifically, the SEO factors that correlate with lower rankings) and how your website can avoid them.

Understandably, the positive SEO factors (those that correlate to higher rankings) are frequently discussed, but smart SEO Philadelphia companies should look at all factors, or the opposite effect, a negative correlation. There are certain factors associated with web page negative rankings that are worth paying attention to for the sake of avoiding them and learning how to better ranking models and correlations.

AdSense. Many individuals (especially new SEO Philadelphia companies) think that using Google’s free services, for instance Analytics and AdSense on your site will contribute to Google favoring your website and achieving a higher rank. Correlation data reveals the opposite—Google AdSense seems to correlate with lower rankings. We’re talking about many AdSense slots, however—pages filled with AdSense ads perform more poorly than pages with fewer Adsense ads. The more volume or space on your site occupied by AdSense, the lower your rankings. Although we can’t say AdSense causes lower rankings directly, we do see a correlation.

“Follow” vs. “NoFollow” Links. If all the links directed towards your domain are followed, you may rank a little power. This is because of domain diversity—sites that rank very competitively tend to have a lot of different types of sites linked to them, including Wikipedia (with many no follows), citations (more no follow links), and a diverse profile of links. As a Philadelphia SEO company, we see that brand new, or “spammier” sites tend to only have one type of link—“followed”, which they work hard for. We encourage link diversity whenever possible!

Length of Domain Name. This one is obvious—simple, shorter domains tend to rank better in search results as opposed to longer ones. “Chairs.com” would rank better than “Buy-Chairs-Online.com”. However, we can’t say that correlation equals causation here. In most cases, simple domain names tend to be much older domains and have accumulated many back links. Dashes are another negative factor as they make domains look “spammy” and thus earn less links. The more hyphens a domain name has, the less positive of a correlation. However this doesn’t mean you can’t choose a longer domain name—they just don’t perform as well from what we’ve seen.

Timely loading. Philadelphia companies should be aware that load time (meaning slower web pages, slower servers) do cause lower rankings. Although there isn’t a lot of data on this, we can see a correlation between page rank and speed. Faster response times do mean for a better user experience. As a SEO Philadelphia company, we advise you to look into the issue if your website is on the slower side.