8 Silly But Harmful SEO Mistakes Even Professionals Make

There’s plenty of room for things to go wrong in SEO. Here are eight seemingly small yet damaging mistakes professionals should watch out for.

Kicking yourself because of a recent SEO oversight?

You’re not alone.

SEO has become a complex field that simply getting down the basics can be a behemoth task.

And the average SEO strategy covers a lot!

There are keywords, meta tags, and off-page optimizations to take care of, aside from more advanced tips, tools, and tricks to learn and use to get the job done well.

It can be overwhelming.

Also, because of the metrics, we can’t hide from any mistakes or oversights because the numbers will show it.

You can be the most detail-oriented, diligent professional out there but the fact is: there’s plenty of room for things to go wrong, or for you to slip up even when you’re at the top of your field.

My hat’s off to you if you’ve never messed up at least one little thing!

Here are eight silly mistakes that even the SEO professionals sometimes make.

1. Leaving a Noindex / Nofollow Command on the Site Upon Launching

You can prevent a page on a website (or an entire website) from appearing in Google by using a noindex meta tag in your site’s header code.

When Googlebot sees that tag, it’ll immediately drop the page from the search results.

That’s useful if you’re still developing your site, or you don’t have root access to a server and want more control over access to specific pages or the whole site for any reason.

But if you forget to take it out before your big site launch?

Oops.

Another mistake can be putting a noindex meta tag into the site’s header code and then blocking the command with a robots.txt.

Remember: you need to do one or the other.

Not both.

Read more: searchenginejournal