How can you keep your SEO practices from hurting your rankings?

To keep SEO efforts from hurting your rankings, start by checking three things: whether content quality has suffered in pursuit of keywords, whether technical changes prevent search engines from accessing your site, and whether link-building efforts prioritize quantity alone. The supplied material supports treating these as risk checks, but a ranking drop after a change does not, by itself, establish that the change caused it. Nor should one website’s experience be treated as a universal rule.

Clarify each page’s purpose before assigning keywords

An article on keyword mapping on Neil Patel’s website notes that pages unintentionally targeting the same keywords may compete with one another. Similar titles may also leave searchers unsure which page to click. Start by listing each page’s primary and secondary keywords, then check for overlapping content rather than simply adding more keywords to every page. (S11)

• List pages, their main topics, and their target keywords to identify pages whose purposes are difficult to distinguish.
• If the content is genuinely similar, consider consolidating it. If the pages serve different purposes, revise their keyword targeting and content focus.
• Check whether repeated keyword insertions make the text sound unnatural, rather than merely checking whether the keywords appear.

For example, two service descriptions with similar titles and similar answers deserve an early review. This does not mean that two pages will necessarily suffer simply because they contain the same term. Another article on the same website, published in 2023, warns that excessive keyword use may constitute keyword stuffing. This is a warning about risk, not a fixed keyword-density formula. (S20)

When changing URLs or maintaining your site, check for access disruptions first

Technical problems can affect the user experience or prevent search crawlers from accessing a website. A Semrush article also notes that broken internal links may hinder crawling, potentially affecting content’s chances of being indexed and ranking. Checks should therefore cover not just the copy, but also whether pages remain accessible through internal links. (S15, S10)

• Check for broken internal and external links, especially internal paths to important content.
• If you plan to switch platforms and change your URL structure, first record the old URLs and their corresponding new pages.

A forum contributor sharing their experience of migrating to Shopify recommended using 301 redirects from old URLs to new ones to shorten the period of ranking disruption. This advice comes from a specific migration experience. It does not guarantee that rankings will remain stable after redirects, nor should the contributor’s estimated recovery time be applied to other sites. (S14)

Check link quality—and your assumptions about cause and effect

If you use broken link building—suggesting that other websites replace broken links with links to your content—review the other links on their pages before reaching out. Neil Patel’s website recommends avoiding placement on pages filled with low-quality or spammy links, rather than focusing solely on whether you can obtain a backlink. (S22)

When assessing ranking changes after modifications, acknowledge the limits of the observations. One forum user reported no short-term ranking improvement after adding links to maps, directions, and menus, and ranking declines after removing nofollow from some long-form articles. This describes only that site’s observations. It does not prove that removing nofollow caused the decline, much less establish a rule that all external links should have nofollow. (S9)