Once again, we’ve updated the content for the 25 Worst SEO Mistakes. The 2026 blog was originally published in 2017 as just 10 mistakes and has been updated several times since then.
In 2026, we list 25 major SEO fails that we often see in small- to midsize businesses (SMBs).
25 Worst SEO Mistakes of SMBs: Table of Contents
SEO Mistakes 10 to 18
10. Using Headings Only as Design Elements
11. Overlooking Internal Linking
12. Writing Generic Meta Descriptions
13. Slighting Schema Markup
14. Blocking Search Engines
15. Giving Users a Slow Start
16. Impatience
17. Allowing Content to Grow Stale
18. Not Measuring Progress
SEO Mistakes 19 to 25
19. Inaction
20. Publishing Orphan Pages
21. Slighting a Secure Socket Layer (SSL)
22. Not Being Mobile Friendly
23. Intentional Deception or Trying to “Game” SEO
24. Ignoring Broken Links
25. Bypassing Google Business Profile
SEO Mistake 1: Hiring Your Friend’s “Cousin Bob.”
Or some other amateur website builder.
We see this all the time with our SMB clients. It rarely ends well, which is why we chose it as one of the worst SEO mistakes.
Sometimes “Cousin Bob” uses obscure platforms that no one else can manage. Often, Bob vanishes from your life — and your website.
Moreover, a website that looks perfectly fine on the outside may be an absolute mess in terms of its optimization for humans, search bots, and AI.
What’s worse, businesses have to pay their SEO agency more to UNDO the harm and THEN DO what should have happened in the first place. It’s a waste of time, money, and resources.
Don’t get caught in the “Cousin Bob” trap.
In sum, your website is one of your most important business assets and a long-term investment. Don’t just opt for the lowest bidder.
Your friend’s “Cousin Bob” may seem like a great option for your website build, but it rarely ends well. The adage, “You get what you pay for,” is true.
Ignoring Google’s best SEO practices is a bad idea. The behemoth controls more than 90% of all searches. Be sure your web designer has an SEO expert on their team.
SEO Mistake 2: Ignoring SEO.
One of the absurd SEO lies people (including some marketers, many web designers, and plenty of small business owners) tell themselves is that SEO is unimportant for their business or their website. This is an SEO mistake and one of the most critical you can make.
SEO is not an optional add-on; it’s inherent to a website. If you’re going to invest money in a website, don’t you want people to find you?
Want to know or find just about anything? Google it!
URL vs SEO
Quick! Name 15 URLs you visited today. (Unlikely that you remember them, right?) Yet, many small business owners firmly believe they ONLY need a URL (web address) to promote their products or services. They think they’ll tell people their web address and Ta! Da!, customers will flock to their website. So they forgo SEO.
That’s not how it works. People “Google” what they’re searching for.
Google dominates search.
Keep in mind that Google controls almost 93% of all search. (This includes Google images, Google Maps, and YouTube—all owned by Google.) Why wouldn’t you follow the behemoth search engine’s advice?
The advice is readily available. Years ago, Google moved from a multiple-page PDF of web/SEO guidelines to extensive online SEO guidance. Most likely, the answers to your web development and SEO questions exist on Google. Follow Google’s development best practices, and your site will fare well.
SEO is key—even or maybe especially in a world of AI chatbots.
SEO is really about the user experience. Can your prospects and customers find you easily? Not just by your brand name, but by your products or services? Can they find you on their mobile device? Do the words on your web page (and under the hood of your website) tell the Googlebot, and therefore your potential customers, what your website page is about?
If you want a good user experience for your prospects and customers, you need to follow SEO best practices.
In sum, if you have a website, SEO ALWAYS matters.
Even in a world of AI Overviews, SEO matters. Maybe even especially in a world of large language models (LLMs) and machine learning (AI).
Engage an SEO (an expert in search engine optimization) BEFORE you build or relaunch a website.
SEO Mistake 3: Launching or Relaunching Without an SEO.
At the start of a redesign or rebuild, an SEO expert can analyze your current page traffic. We’ll be sure to include relevant, successful content on the new website and remove or update stale, underperforming content.
We’ll also carefully review EVERY URL on your existing website and retain or redirect them as appropriate on your new website. With these precautions, search engines will “understand” your pages more quickly.
Without an SEO, you’re likely to lose rankings and organic traffic, and your recovery will be slower. The larger the change, the more problematic your search results will be. Therefore, we chose it as one of the worst website missteps.
In sum, SEO involvement is critical to every website relaunch, refresh, or redesign.
SEO Mistake 4. Disregarding User Intent.
Remember the old breakup line: “It’s not you. It’s me.”?
When it comes to your website, and arguably your entire business, it’s not you, it’s them.
It’s not about you or your business alone. It’s also about what potential and current customers want and need from you.
Disregarding user intent is a huge SEO mistake and one of the most frequent we see.
What is user intent?
What is your potential customer or client looking for? That’s their intent.
Too often, businesses write website content that delivers ONLY on what the COMPANY wants to tell them. Instead, focus on what the CUSTOMER is looking for.
Too often, companies want to focus on themselves. Focus on your customers. Consider relevant user intent.
Why does user intent matter?
User intent is what RankBrain, a core part of Google’s algorithm, is all about. Since 2015, Google’s RankBrain has used machine learning and artificial intelligence to help determine the order in which Google serves content on its search results pages (SERPs).
What does this mean? It means Google wants to match what a person is querying (“googling”) in the search box to what they really want. If the Google-er doesn’t click on any of the search returns and then rewords the query differently, the machine “learns” about the user’s intent.
RankBrain helps Google match the query words using a complex mathematical formula. If unsure, RankBrain will return a few varied responses. Again, it learns from what Google-ers click.
In the past, about 15% of all queries had never been queried before. Even with chatbots and longer queries, Google reiterated that 15% of daily queries in 2025 had never been searched before.
Importantly, RankBrain remains core to Google’s algorithm.
How can we know user intent?
Too often, business owners want to use their professional jargon. They insist on expert phrasing. But you must use your customer’s language. Not your lingo.
Research the phrases
Using specialized paid tools, we look first at keyword phrases. Which relevant keywords do your customers query and how frequently?
Test the phrases
Second, we search for those keywords on Google. We observe the search engine results. Then, we scroll down to the bottom of the page and read the phrase “People also ask” or “People also search for.” Right there, on the SERP (search engine results page), Google is telling you what RankBrain believes the user intent is.
In sum, give users what they want, when they want it, and how they ask for it.
A business that specializes in serving pulled pork sandwiches would not want to focus solely on the term “pulled pork.” Most people who search for “pulled pork” are looking for recipes. The phrase “pulled pork restaurant” or “pulled pork city, state” would be more suitable.
SEO Mistake 5. Configuring Messy URLs.
Your URL is your unique page identifier. Poorly configured URLs will impact your website’s results. Although less common than it used to be, we still see this SEO mistake.
Six mistakes that will squelch your rankings include:
- Creating overly long URLs; shorter URLs get more clicks.
- Applying a generic, meaningless URL naming convention (e.g., https://domainname/page-1/).
- Stuffing an abundance of keywords into your URL; search engines will penalize your site.
- Frequently changing your URLs; you’ll confuse the search engines and your users.
- Changing URLs without setting up a 301 redirect.
- Creating duplicate URLs.
At the same time, Google says URL length technically can be as long as 1,000 characters–and that’s a loooong URL!
Believe it or not, we still see outlier business websites that have not optimized their URLs. If they do so after launch, they would need to set up 301 redirects for every page. This, too, is not ideal.
In sum, follow best practices for URL naming at launch.
Then, as is reasonable, leave the URL alone!
Don’t upload giant images. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) By giant images, we’re referring to the number of KBs in the file size.
SEO Mistake 6: Shunning Image Optimization.
Common image-handling SEO mistakes for SMB websites that we see include:
- Uploading large, high-resolution images is unnecessary and will slow your website loading times.
- Not converting to a smaller web-ready file type, such as a WebP instead of a PNG or JPG.
- Not naming the image appropriately before uploading it; the file name reads “IMG128690.jpg,” “face.png,” “headshot. webp,” or some other unspecified filename.
- Your alt tags don’t relate to your images or are keyword-stuffed.
Google wants its image search results to be accurate. If someone is looking for an image of your company’s president, they’re not going to search for the keyword “face.”
Therefore, use keywords only when they are relevant to the image.
Read more about image SEO best practices.
In sum, apply Google’s best practices to your images.
SEO Mistake 7. Creating Thin Content.
Thin content is low-quality content.
Large language models and other forms of machine learning (artificial intelligence) rely on high-quality content. So do humans.
What’s more, Google has been using AI in search for many, many years. (People are just talking about AI more now, because of chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.) Google researchers introduced Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), a language model that helped Googlebot understand natural language, in October 2018. ChatGPT was released four years later.
Helpful, Reliable, People-first Content
Is your content unique or original? Are you providing commentary or new insights? If so, Google will rank your site higher.
Google has extensively talked about quality content.
See what Google has to say about “helpful, reliable, people-first” content and expert, authoritative, trustworthy content by experienced authors (E-E-A-T).
Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness
Long before the introduction of people-first and E-E-A-T, Google urged people to write quality content. Quality content is one of the three most important factors among the hundreds (thousands?) of factors in the ever-changing ranking algorithm updates, with its long history.
Content Length, Reading, and Scanning
If you’re going for simplicity and few or no words on the website page, you’re not likely to rank very well. We see this a lot. Web designers want a clean, simple look. Clients say, “My prospects/customers/visitors won’t read the website.”It’s an SEO mistake.
Users do read, and they don’t. Research shows that people scan web content, typically in an F-pattern. Furthermore, they do slow down and read paragraphs that interest them. Bullets, numbers, brief sentences, short paragraphs, bold text, and images all help break up text-heavy pages. These text and design elements engage the reader.
What’s more, research indicates that longer content is more likely to rank on that coveted page 1. However, Google vehemently denies that the number of words on the page matters.
Think about it.“Contact us” pages consistently rank well. And they have very little content.
Your website content, especially your writing, are arguably the most important part of a well-optimized website. Ensure your content is unique, interesting, and helpful to users.
Content Length, Reading, and Scanning
Content Goals
At our agency, we say that the words on the page have to achieve three objectives:
- Fulfill the user’s intent (in other words, be what the “Googler” was looking for). Simply put, it needs to be what the person wants and needs.
- Have a sufficient quantity of text so that the robot crawlers can “understand” what the page is about.
- Tell the user what you want them to know (your brand message)–as long as it’s what they want to know, too.
In sum, write well; don’t be afraid of word count. But don’t stress if it’s “under 300” or “under 600 words”—even if an SEO tool tells you to fix it.
SEO Mistake 8: Deploying Confusing Navigation.
A site that is poorly organized or requires deep linking (e.g., five clicks to reach the information) will not rank well in search engine results.
Choose your call to action (CTA).
When you send people to your site, what do you want them to do? When you know the answer to that question (your CTA), every page can funnel your prospect or customer in that direction.
Avoid these three navigation practices.
Navigation that is totally reliant on images, drop-down menus, or animations will stifle your ranking.
Navigation must not be an afterthought.
We’ve all seen disorganized websites. They’re like houses with too many remodels. They don’t make sense. They are more like mazes than user-friendly systems.
Submit your sitemap.
At launch (or relaunch), be sure to submit an HTML sitemap organized by subject.
In sum, launch your site with organized, logical content, and maintain it.
Websites that are built without a master navigational plan are like houses that have undergone too many remodels. They are more like mazes than user-friendly systems.
SEO Mistake 9: Neglecting Page Title Optimization.
Page titles are not the same as headings. They are metadata that underlie your web page.
You will devalue your website by making these Page Title SEO Mistakes.
- Leaving your title tag blank.
- Having a page title that is irrelevant or unrelated to the page content.
- Duplicating a title tag.
- Using the same page title across multiple pages–a default website setting.
- Writing an unwieldy title tag or one stuffed with keywords
Although title tags can be a variety of lengths. If you wish to avoid a truncated title tag in the search results, adjust your title tag length for each page to fewer than 60 characters (including spaces).
Additionally, briefly include your brand or company name.
Google offers extensive guidance about your page titles.
In sum, give users clues in the title tag to help users and search engines understand the page content.
SEO Mistake 10. Using Headings Only as Design Elements.
Erratic use of headings and subheadings will also cause your site to sink deeper into the search engine abyss. Use headings and subheadings to outline your content. Help Googlebot follow along. Google provides guidance for the use of headers.
Do not use your heads and subheads as design elements. We see this mistake frequently. Instead, use H2s and H3s to guide the readers and the search bots that are crawling your pages.
Furthermore, the heading structure guides the reader, and the proper use of headings addresses accessibility issues. Web designers in the USA are supposed to build ADA accessible websites. Far, far too many companies, especially small and midsize businesses, are unaware that their website is breaking the law.
Additionally, your headings should be short and contain keyword phrases when appropriate.
In sum, use headings properly to outline your content for people, search bots, and ADA compliance.
Headings are NOT just design elements. They must be applied with AI, SEO, and accessibility best practices in mind.
SEO Mistake 11. Overlooking Internal Linking.
Many small and midsize businesses ignore adding links between pages (internal links). Not having internal links is an SEO mistake for many reasons.
How pages get in the search results
For pages to be in search results, Google and other search engines must:
- Discover the page (know it exists)
- Crawl the pages
- Index the page
Search robots crawl the internet between a web of page URLs.
Why internal links facilitate indexing
Internal links help search engines crawl and index your website. If you’re older, you may remember the term spider or crawler. Think of your pages like spiderwebs; pieces of that spiderweb are linked together across pages so that “spiders” (aka searchbots) can crawl over their silky strands from one page to another.
When you link relevant phrases properly, you help ensure.
- Searchbots discover your new content.
- Search engines can deem what’s important (because you link to it frequently).
- A better experience for your website visitor.
- Improve page ranking.
- Help create context with the relevant phrase that you’re linking from.
Bonus: You don’t have to repeat the same content on every page. You can link the phrase to the page where it’s explained in depth.
Avoid “click here” as anchor text. It is meaningless to both search robots and website visitors.
Writing vague anchor text
Still using “click here” as your anchor text? Or referencing an earlier “blog” or “page?” Do you include your actual URL in the text when it’s unnecessary? These missteps will cost you in the rankings.
Exact-word anchor text may help your search rankings.
In sum, use anchor text to help Googlebot and users understand the content of the linked page.
Be sure not to overdo it by “overlinking.” Also, avoid breaking links, and ensure that you’re linking to improve the human experience as well as your SEO. In other words, the links and phrases are relevant.
SEO Mistake 12: Writing Generic Meta Descriptions.
Overusing keywords in your meta description may ding your site’s search rankings. An excessively long meta description or immaterial content also may harm a site’s search rankings.
Avoid duplication.
Google flags missing and duplicate meta descriptions in its meta description guidance.
Mind your length.
Moz recommends keeping meta description length under 160 characters, but long enough to be descriptive. However, in November 2017, Google updated its algorithm, allowing for meta descriptions to nearly double in length. Then in 2018, it decreased the length again. Maintain meta description lengths at about 150-160 characters (including spaces).
Why the range in character count? A capital W takes up more real estate than a lowercase L or capital I.
Write for humans.
Google’s current guidance is to write meta descriptions for humans. Help Google-ers know what your site is about. Use a keyword phrase. Be informative and eloquent. This is a great place for savvy marketers to showcase their skills.
Be compelling.
In our opinion, every meta description should scream, “Pick me! Pick me!”
In sum, be descriptive and follow best practices for meta descriptions.
In our opinion, every meta description should scream, “Pick me! Pick me!”
SEO Mistake 13: Slighting Schema Markup.
Schema markup is code that helps search bots understand the kind of content they are crawling.
Many different kinds of content can include schema markup.
Content such as names, addresses, and phone numbers (NAPs), books, blogs, recipes, products, and many other types can contain this code.
For example, blogs have publication dates, authors, and titles. Recipes have names, ingredients, reviews, and directions.
Website visitors will often click search results with rich snippets from structured data schema markup. As a result, your site may enhance the user experience. As a result, RankBrain may favor you.
Neil Patel provides a thorough overview of how to apply schema markup. Schema markup improves search ranking, and it’s a tool in the SEO arsenal that many are not yet using. Read as “SEO advantage.” Google also provides documentation about this type of structured data markup.
Google provides an opportunity to test your markup.
In sum, apply schema markup.
SEO Mistake 14. Blocking Search Engines.
It’s more common than you’d think. Why in the world would your small or midsize company’s website be blocked from search engines?
Blocking search crawlers is common and expected during website development.
When developing a site, we want to block search engines from crawling it. In this way, prospects and customers won’t discover a half-baked website. Many web developers will not host the site in a live environment. Others block Google (and other search engines) from finding the site. That’s perfectly fine.
Where blocking search engine robots goes awry
The mistake occurs when a developer forgets to unblock a website at launch.
We’ve seen this Googlebot blocking mistake firsthand at a local marketing agency. While reviewing the website’s analytics (apparently no one else had), I discovered that 0% of the search traffic was organic (from search engines) over the year.
The toggle “allow search engines to crawl this site” was left on “off” in WordPress.
What happens when search engines are prohibited?
When individuals typed in the URL or clicked on a provided link, the site was displayed.
But for a year, Google, Bing, and other search engines hadn’t been permitted to crawl the text and code of the website.
This lack of permission meant that the search engine results pages (SERPs) had NEVER shown the website that the agency had developed. Yikes.
In sum, be sure search engines can crawl your site.
Google Search Console is the best tool to check whether your pages are being discovered, crawled, or indexed. But even Google Analytics (GA-4) can determine if your website is getting organic search traffic. Moreover, both tools are free.
If you recently launched or relaunched your website, be sure someone is checking whether you’re getting organic traffic.
When we launch websites we designed, we always monitor this for all our clients. Moreover, we submit the sitemap and relevant pages to Google for inspection, crawling, and indexing.
SEO Mistake 15: Giving Users a Slow Start.
In the past, one user experience factor Google considered was your website’s loading speed. Google measured the page load time in seconds. Search engines ranked slow websites poorly. Not only is a slow-loading website an SEO mistake, but it also creates a poor user experience.
Core Web Vitals
Today, Google has taken this speed measurement further. Google calls these three measurements Core Web Vitals. The Core Web Vitals measure page performance in three areas:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how quickly the content appears visually
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): whether the content shifts or jumps as it loads
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly you can interact with the page, or responsiveness
Your visitors do not want to wait for your website to load. Simultaneously, Google does not want to deliver a slow experience to its “Googlers.”
A slow website is an SEO mistake.
In sum, ensure your website loads quickly on all devices.
- LCP should occur in less than 2.5 seconds.
- INP is less than 200 milliseconds.
- CLS is a score that is to be less than 0.1.
You can check the performance of your mobile and desktop websites. See the performance results. They indicate whether your Core Web Vitals are fast (green), need improvement (yellow), or slow (red) for that page’s URL. Furthermore, the performance score will help you know what the web designer needs to fix.
SEO Mistake 16. Impatience.
You’ve optimized for SEO and the user experience. Your site loads quickly, you’ve included internal links, and you’ve followed all of Google’s best practices.
Awesome!
But… Patience, Grasshopper! The more your website changes and the larger it is, the longer it may take search engines to index your pages. In some cases, you may wait 4-6 months before your organic search traffic begins to rise.
In sum, be patient. SEO is an investment in your business—not a “get rich quick” scheme.
SEO Mistake 17. Allowing Content to Grow Stale.
You’ve built your SMB website, you patiently waited for it to get traffic, and it does. Ta! Da!
You’ve finished, right?
WRONG.
Don’t just set it and forget it. Novelty is important to SEO.
Ignoring your website is a mistake. Not only is maintenance required, but Google thrives on fresh, unique new content. What’s more, links can break, and content can become outdated—or even erroneous.
Thinks of the search bots, not as smiling robots, but hungry monsters that thrive on devouring new content, casting aside longstanding content.
In sum, regularly serve up new website content to the hungry searchbots.
SEO Mistake 18: Not Measuring Progress.
Website analytics, such as Google Search Console combined with Google Analytics (GA-4), provide robust information about the state of your website and its organic (SEO) health.
Questions that GSC and GA-4 can answer
These platforms can help answer these questions:
- Have my website pages been discovered, crawled, and/or indexed by search engines? Which ones?
- Is my content ranking well compared to competitors’ content?
- Which of my meta descriptions are most compelling? Most forgettable?
- What pages are your website visitors viewing the least? Most?
- Which pages are visitors reading? Scanning? Ignoring?
- What interests your readers? Search engines? No one?
We measure all of these monthly for our website audit clients who want monthly metrics.
In sum, again, don’t set it and forget it. Instead, pay attention weekly or monthly to what’s working well on your website–and what’s not.
Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics 4 (GA-4) are free tools that can answer most questions you might have about your website performance.
Be sure to take action and fix website performance issues that you identify in your website metrics.
SEO Mistake 19: Inaction.
Insights without action are meaningless.
If you seek professional help for a serious problem with your home, health, or auto, you’d have the professional fix the problem.
Similarly, the diagnostics (metrics) for your website can guide your next steps.
We can help you make informed changes:
- Ensure your pages are crawled
- Edit content that is performing more poorly than competitors
- Rewrite feeble meta descriptions
- Safely remove outdated pages.
In sum, be sure to act on your data.
Pay attention monthly (if not weekly) to what’s functioning well on your website and what’s not. Then, make changes based on solid numbers. Not whims. Not the shiny object du jour. Solid insights.
SEO Mistake 20: Publishing Orphan Pages.
By linking relevant text from one page to the next on your website, you help search engines find both pages. If you create new content and no other pages link to it, you’re unlikely to get traffic to the “orphaned” content.
In sum, create anchor links between pages. Just be sure the context is relevant.
SEO Mistake 21. Slighting a Secure Sockets Layer (an SSL).
For years, Google has emphasized the importance of having a secure website. In the summer of 2018, the search engine began to penalize sites that lacked this essential feature.
Although we see this issue less frequently now, it often occurs with small and medium-sized business (SMB) owners who have not updated their websites for several years.
Curious if your site has an SSL certificate?
The easiest way to check is to open your website in Chrome and observe the browser window. If you see a lock icon and the URL starts with “https” (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure), your site is secure and has the necessary SSL certificate.
Conversely, if your site displays an exclamation mark and the message “Not secure” in a clear, sans-serif font, followed by “http” (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), then you have a problem. Without an SSL certificate, your site not only becomes less secure but also appears outdated. Additionally, since 2014, HTTPS has been a minor ranking signal, meaning that Google may lower your search ranking if your site does not have SSL.
If your website URL starts with https rather than http, you have an SSL certificate.
In sum, get your SSL.
When you do, be sure to properly transfer your URLs from HTTP to HTTPS by following Google’s detailed guidelines.
Most website hosting companies don’t make you pay for an SSL certificate. The exception? GoDaddy.
SEO Mistake 22. Not Being Mobile-Friendly.
In our experience, about 57% to 70% of monthly website searches (and visitors) are on mobile phones — even among most business-to-business (B2B) clients. For business-to-consumer (B2C) clients, it is sometimes even higher.
The number of mobile-friendly websites has increased, but SMBs sometimes scale back content on their mobile sites.
You can check out whether your site is mobile-friendly.
Google warned for years that mobility would be important. In 2018, it began using mobile-first indexing. In other words, it usually crawls and indexes your mobile website (rather than your desktop site).
Today, Google doesn’t indicate whether a website renders well in mobile search. Their rationale is that most sites are mobile-friendly by now.
While that may be true for enterprise websites, some SMBs still lack mobile-friendly websites.
Not having a mobile-friendly website is an SEO problem. It may determine whether your content appears in search results at all.
In sum, ensure that your website functions well and looks good on a smartphone.
Even if you’re a B2B company, check how your website looks on mobile devices—not just a desktop computer.
Since 2004, Google primarily crawls the mobile version of your website. Make your website functions well on a smartphone.
SEO Mistake 23. Intentional Deception or Trying to “Game” SEO.
Black Hat Practices
“Black hat” practices or anything that tries to “cheat the system” are probably the worst SEO “mistake” someone can make.
We often see clients who unwittingly write copy with extensive lists, including dozens of related keywords stuffed onto the page. Unknowing, unintentional errors like these will cause websites to rank lower on search engine return pages (SERPs). Content writers and website designers can correct these types of errors.
Jumping on the Latest SEO Bandwagon: AIO
When ranking updates occur, people try to “game” the system.
Companies have written mountains of weak content, generating pages that compete against themselves. They have tried linking schemes. They stuffed as many keywords as possible into their content. In the long run, these were detrimental to them.
The most recent, and probably the biggest, SEO ranking update of all time was the dawn of AI Overviews in search engine results pages (SERPs). This SERP update occurred in the late summer of 2025.
Today, people are trying to get on AI chatbots, using unproven but popularly recommended AIO, GEO, or GIO strategies.
Intentional Deception
By contrast, intentional deception will get your entire site banned from Google.
Hidden text, for example, white text on a white background, and sneaky redirects (cloaking) are two examples of intentional deception.
In reality, they’re more than SEO errors. They’re errors in judgment.
(We used to include scraping content from others’ websites. However, that is EXACTLY what many AI search bots do now.)
Hidden text, sneaky redirects, and cloaking are examples of intentionally deceptive website practices. All are SEO mistakes.
Cloaking is even worse. Cloaking is the practice of sending one type of data to Googlebot and another to users. An example of cloaking that Google provides: sending cartoons to Googlebot and pornography to users.
One client didn’t want to pay the small monthly fee for website maintenance. Soon, the small healthcare company website was redirecting visitors to pornographic images. It happens.
“Bad actors” from the United States and its enemies sit on their computers all day. Their purpose? To interrupt American businesses of all sizes. Small and midsize businesses are not immune.
In sum, don’t act like scum.
Keep your website and SEO practices “white hat.” Furthermore, don’t jump on every recommendation that comes along.
Instead, focus on quality content that your prospects and customers want to see.
SEO Mistake 24: Ignoring Broken Links.
Your site will take a tumble in the rankings if there are many broken links — particularly in your HTML sitemap.
In Google Search Console, you can see whether your website has internal broken links. Sometimes, 404 errors are fitting. For example, if you permanently discontinue a product, a 404 error is appropriate. Other times, it lets you know that something broke.
Other tools are appropriate for checking your external links (those that point to other websites).
In sum, monitor your website for broken links and fix them.
25. Bypassing Google Business Profile (GBP).
Your Google Business profile (formerly Google My Business) can be front and center in local search results—even if your website is not. This profile page is an important opportunity for local businesses.
First, verify and claim your profile. Then optimize it for SEO. Moz offers a complete guide to optimizing your profile page. Another helpful resource is from SEMRush, which offers Google Business Profile optimization strategies.
When our agency launched 8 years ago, most SMBs weren’t even aware that this free listing was available to them. Today, most are aware, but many Google Business Profiles are not optimized or kept up to date.
Unfortunately, Google charges for some of the optimization features, making them out of reach for many SMBs.
But some features are free. For instance, be sure to post at least weekly. Additionally, request and respond to reviews—even negative ones — politely.
In sum, take advantage of your Google Business Profile.
Nancy Burgess
