The Definitive Guide to Why Google Hates You: 20 Reasons Your Website Isn’t Performing Well

Part 1

For starters – Google may just hate you. We’re lookin’ at you Musk. 😉  But it’s more likely that there’s some fine print you didn’t read about how Google wants you to do things. Totally a drag, I know.

There are a multitude of reasons Google may not be ranking your site highly or sending much traffic your way. From technical SEO issues to problems with your content, or questionable backlinks, to indexing issues, many factors influence how the Google algorithm views and ranks your site.

This fairly definitive guide will cover the first 7 reasons you may be struggling to rank in Google, plus some actions you can take to turn things around. Master these SEO best practices, and you’ll be well on your way to improving your site’s visibility and performance in organic search.

Reason 1: Your Site Isn’t Mobile Friendly

In this day and age, failing to have a mobile friendly website is SEO suicide. With more than 60% of searches happening on mobile devices, a site that hasn’t been optimized for smartphones will get punished by Google’s mobile-first index algorithm.

Technical elements like font sizes that are too small, excessive vertical scrolling, Flash content rather than HTML5, and a lack of tap targets for fat fingers can all cause Google to label your site as not mobile friendly. Verify your site’s mobile readiness with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool, and make adjustments until you get the all clear “mobile friendly” badge.

Reason 2: Pages Load Too Slowly

You may have brilliant content, but none of that matters if your pages take forever to load. Google has made page speed a ranking factor, looking closely at metrics like Time To Interactive and Time to First Byte. They want to serve up sites that load the fastest to provide searchers the best user experience.

Test your website page load times, and optimize images, enable compression, minimize redirects, and upgrade your hosting if needed until you’re loading pages in under 2 seconds. The faster the speed the better, as a site loading in 1.5s will typically outrank an identical site loading in 2.3s.

Reason 3: Schema Markup Is Missing

By adding structured data schema markup to your site, you’re speaking Google’s language and helping its bots better digest your content. JSON-LD and Microdata formats allow you to embed rich snippets, star ratings, events, and more that can display directly in the search results.

Install Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool Chrome extension to discover where you’re missing opportunities to improve search appearance with markup. Focus first on your homepage, product category pages, blog posts, and other priority landing pages.

Reason 4: Thin or Low Value Content

In the past, flooding sites with lots of low-quality content allowed you to essentially keyword stuff thousands of pages and hope some ranks. Those days are long gone. Google’s algorithms have advanced to becoming extremely adept at detecting thin content that adds little value for searchers.

Comb through your site for filler blog posts that are only a paragraph or two, category or tag archives with minimal unique text, and other pages that fail to pass muster. Choose quality over quantity, beefing up and consolidating pages rather than removing them to avoid dead links.

Reason 5: Improper Redirects, or no-redirects

A website redesign can refresh outdated content and make it easier to showcase your products, services, and expertise. But major changes to your site structure can also create indexing issues in Google if they’re not handled carefully.

Rather than doing a single mass redirect of all old URLs to new URLs, recreate important pages on the same URL path to retain the SEO value when possible. Set proper 301 redirects for any pages without an equivalent in the redesign. And use the Change of Address tool to map old site sections to new sections.

Reason 6: Duplicate Content on the Site

While thin content creates one problem, having too much duplicate, scraped, or AI generated content causes other issues. Verbatim content appearing on multiple pages of your site or copied word-for-word from other sites makes it impossible for Google to discern the definitive page to index or rank. And frankly, what extra value are you really adding with that anyway?

Uncover junky autogenerated tag pages, reused descriptions or certain types of meta data, plagiarized blog posts, and other duplicate type content pollution via copyscape tools. Remove lower value duplicates or rewrite them with more value and use canonical tags or 301 redirects to signal the version you want indexed moving forward.

Reason 7: Lack of Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust (E-E-A-T)

Google prioritizes websites that show strong experience, expertise, authority, and trust (E-E-A-T). Google looks at signals like how much real experience your content shows, who’s behind it, the quality of your sources, your site’s history, whether it’s secure (HTTPS), and how easy it is to use.

To strengthen these signals, show who is behind your content and why they’re qualified. Show that your content comes from real experience. Add author bios, link to solid sources, and make your business details easy to find. Over time, publishing strong content and getting mentioned by reputable sites helps build trust.