5 mistakes that kill your Google ranking

After analysing hundreds of pages in SEO audits, the same errors keep appearing — and almost always at the cost of traffic that should have been there all along. None of them are exotic; they are fundamentals Google takes very seriously.

The first mistake is a slow mobile site. Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) are a direct ranking factor since 2024. A site loading in over three seconds on mobile loses visitors before they read a single line. The usual culprits: uncompressed images, render-blocking JavaScript, and poor hosting.

The second mistake is duplicate pages without canonical URLs. Many WordPress sites generate identical content across multiple URLs — with and without www, with and without trailing slash, as category archives and as posts. Google doesn't know which is authoritative and splits ranking signals across them. Canonical tags and proper redirects solve this.

The third mistake is content written for search engines, not people. Keyword stuffing no longer works — Google's Helpful Content update penalises pages that seem to exist only for crawlers. Useful, specific, directly relevant writing wins.

The fourth mistake is broken internal links and orphan pages — pages no link on the site points to. Crawlers struggle to reach them, link equity doesn't flow there, and users can't find them organically. A basic crawl audit exposes this in minutes.

The fifth mistake is ignoring Search Console. It's a free tool that shows exactly what Google sees: indexing errors, pages Google excludes, queries where your site appears but nobody clicks. Many site owners never even open a report. Feather Studio includes Search Console monitoring as standard in all SEO engagements — book a free audit if you want to see where your site stands.