Search engines are way more intelligent now than they have been in the past, which means that ranking high now is a little more difficult than it was before. It is like this because search engines gauge a website using different measures and penalize webmasters severely if some key guidelines are not followed.
Some of them are:
1. Having duplicate content onsite: If you publish a post by copying content from different areas of the internet, you will not really be penalized for plagiarising. But if you have two exact pages of content on your website, your rankings will suffer a lot. This measure makes sense because even though search engines cannot really decide who “originated” certain content, they most likely can see and cross-check content on your website. So make sure there are no duplicate pages on your website.
2. Stuffing keywords in your pages: If you use a lot of keywords in a sentence which makes it look unnatural to a human visitor, you can expect the search engines to penalize you. For example, using a keyword twice in a sentence is fine. But if you use your keywords 10 times in the same sentence (excessively), you can be sure to flunk the rankings.
3. Linking to bad neighborhoods: Bad neighborhoods can be thought of as websites which contain dpulicate content, are devoid of any design, are junk or are simply link farms which add no value. Even though you cannot get penalized by who links to you (because that is outside your control), you will get severely penalized if you delibrately link out to bad neighborhoods. Make sure to check the website you link out to in advance. It will save you a lot of hassle later.
4. Do link building using just one keyword phrase: Try building up 5000 links to your websites in a short timeframe usng the same keywords. What you will experience (normally) is that your website rises in ranks, stays there for 2 weeks and then vanishes. Although you are not banned from Google, because your pages are still indexed, you will most certainly be facing a penalty for bad SEO practices.
Make sure you avoid these measures if you want your website to rank high.
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