The 11 Deadly Sins of Search Engine Optimization
I published the first version of this in January 2023. Rereading it is a bit like hearing a recording of yourself from three years back: the bones are fine, the delivery makes you wince.
So, same list, rebuilt. Eleven SEO mistakes, in roughly the order people commit them. Four of them weren’t on the original because they didn’t really exist yet, and a couple of the originals turned out to be things I’d repeated because everyone repeats them, which is its own kind of sin.
You have probably committed at least one of these. I have committed at least three.
1. Thou shalt not stuff thy keywords into every corner of thy site
The oldest sin on the list, and it will outlive us all, because it feels like work. You found the phrase. You put the phrase everywhere. Surely that counts for something.
It doesn’t, and hasn’t for years, and the reason people keep doing it anyway is that the alternative is harder to measure. Writing a page that genuinely answers a question doesn’t produce a satisfying number at the end.
Put the phrase in the title, in one heading, somewhere in the first paragraph, and then leave it alone and write normally. If a sentence exists only to hold a keyword, delete the sentence.
2. Thou shalt not publish the same page twice
Almost nobody does this on purpose. What happens is that a page gets rebuilt at a new URL during a redesign, the old one never gets retired because nobody remembers it exists, and now you have two versions of the same thing competing for the same query.
Google doesn’t punish you for it. It just picks one and ignores the other, and about a third of the time it picks the one you’d have picked last.
Decide which version wins. Redirect the loser to it. Check that the canonical tag agrees with the redirect, because I’ve seen plenty of cases where those two disagree and the site owner had no idea.
3. Thou shalt not buy thy links
Someone will always offer you a hundred backlinks for less than the cost of dinner. Those links come from websites whose entire reason for existing is selling links, which is roughly as obvious to a search engine as it sounds when you say it out loud.
This is spam under Google’s own policies, and the policy covers the respectable-looking versions too: paid guest posts, private blog networks, the outreach tools that mail the same template to a thousand strangers.
The uncomfortable part is that bought links sometimes work for a while. That’s why the practice survives. It stops working on a schedule you don’t control.
4. Thou shalt not leave thy links broken
Nobody sets out to break a link. Pages move, products get retired, a client changes their domain without telling you, and six months later there are forty dead links on the site and no one has noticed because no one clicks them twice.
Run a crawl every quarter. I go into broken links, redirect chains and the other quiet technical failures properly in common technical SEO issues.
5. Thou shalt not bar the crawlers from thy gates
A page that can’t be crawled can’t rank, and the usual culprit is embarrassingly small: a stray disallow line in robots.txt, or a noindex tag that was correct on the staging site and got pushed live with everything else. Google’s robots.txt documentation covers what each directive actually does, which is worth twenty minutes if you’ve never read it properly.
Check it twice now, because the list of crawlers that matter has got longer. If you want to show up in AI answers, look at whether you’re blocking those bots as well.
6. Thou shalt not neglect thy on-page basics
Titles, meta descriptions, headings, URLs. None of it is clever and all of it still works.
A title tag takes two minutes and decides whether anyone clicks your result at all. Heading structure takes ten minutes and tells readers and crawlers the same thing about what the page covers. Neither will ever feel like the interesting part of the job.
That’s exactly why it gets skipped. There’s no dashboard that lights up when you write a good title, so people skip ahead to the tactics that come with charts. Then they wonder why the charts aren’t moving. The short version of what to fix first is in five ways to improve your website SEO right now.
7. Thou shalt not punish thy visitors
Six seconds to load. Layout that jumps under your thumb halfway through a sentence. A newsletter popup, a cookie banner and a chat bubble arriving in sequence before you’ve read a word.
Core Web Vitals put numbers on most of this, and the numbers are useful for arguing with a developer. For yourself, skip them. Open your own site on your own phone, on whatever connection you actually have rather than office wifi, and count.
8. Thou shalt not publish what thou hast not read
This is the modern one, and I run into it constantly now.
Someone generates a post, reads the opening paragraph, decides it sounds right and publishes. What goes up is fluent and confident and completely hollow. There’s no fact in it the writer could defend if challenged, no position anyone could argue with, and every so often a claim that’s just wrong, sitting there in a nicely formatted paragraph.
Google’s stated position is that it doesn’t care how content was made, only whether it’s helpful and reliable. That sounds generous until you notice that unread output is rarely either of those things.
I use these tools every day. What separates the useful from the worthless has nothing to do with the tool and everything to do with whether somebody who knows the subject read every line afterwards and cut the parts that were merely plausible. That editing pass is the job now. It’s less fun than writing and considerably more important.
If you wouldn’t put your name at the bottom of it, don’t put it on your site.
9. Thou shalt not write for the keyword and ignore the seeker
A keyword is a compressed question, and compression throws things away.
Someone typing “best CRM” wants to be shown a comparison. Someone typing “what is a CRM” wants three sentences and a definition. Serve the second person your comparison table and they’re gone in four seconds, and it will not matter at all how carefully you optimized the page.
Most content briefs go wrong right here. They specify the phrase, the word count and a deadline, and say nothing whatsoever about what the person searching is trying to find out, so the writer produces something that matches the string and misses the point.
Before writing anything, go and look at what currently ranks for the phrase. Not to copy it. Those ten results are Google’s current answer to the question of what this query means, which is free information about your competition and your reader at the same time. If page one is nothing but listicles and you’ve planned a product page, you have just learned something important.
Grouping keywords by intent instead of by volume is most of the discipline. My approach is in keyword grouping and how to do it right.
10. Thou shalt not hide who wrote it
Most business websites publish anonymously. No byline, no bio, no way for a reader to work out whether the person explaining tax law is an accountant or a copywriter who spent an afternoon on it.
That’s always been a trust problem. I think it’s becoming a visibility problem too. Google’s quality rater guidelines ask who stands behind a page, and my own read is that AI answer engines are heading the same direction, because anything summarizing an answer has to decide whose answer it is.
The fix is small enough to be annoying. Put a real byline on every post. Write a bio that says what you do and how long you’ve been doing it, and resist the urge to make it sound grander than it is. Link it to wherever else you exist online. Add Person and Organization structured data so machines can read what humans already can.
Doing this won’t move you up the rankings by itself, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
11. Thou shalt not move thy site without a map
The most expensive mistake here is a migration done in a hurry, and I know that because I’ve cleaned up after one of my own.
Every URL that had traffic or links needs somewhere specific to land. Miss them and whatever those pages earned evaporates. Redirect them all to your homepage instead of to their actual counterparts and you have achieved the same result with more steps and more confidence.
What nobody warns you about is the stuff that survives the move invisibly. On a site of my own, three links and one image kept pointing back at the platform I’d left. Everything rendered perfectly, so there was nothing to notice and nobody went looking. They sat there for nine months and I only found them during an audit about something else entirely. Hotlinked images are the nastiest version, because they don’t degrade gradually. They all break at once, on somebody else’s schedule, the morning that old account lapses.
So: before you migrate, export every URL and map each one to its destination, and keep the list somewhere you’ll find it again. Afterwards, crawl the new site and search the source of every page for the old platform’s domain. Not the visible text. The source.
What to do with all this
Recognizing yourself in several of these is the normal outcome, and most of it is fixable in an afternoon or two.
Start with anything blocking crawling, because nothing else you do matters while a page can’t be reached. Then fix what confuses, then improve what merely underwhelms. I have yet to find a situation where that order was wrong.
The older sins are technical, which makes them tractable. The newer ones are about judgement, and judgement doesn’t come with a plugin.
If you’d rather someone else worked through the list with you, that’s the job. You can see how it has gone for other people, or just tell me what’s wrong with your site.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most common SEO mistake?
Publishing pages nothing links to. It sounds too obvious to be true, but orphaned pages are common, and far less discussed than keyword stuffing, because nothing about them looks broken. The page loads. The content is fine. No internal link points at it, so visitors can’t navigate there and crawlers rarely bother. Before you optimize anything, check that every page on your site is reachable from at least one other page.
Can SEO mistakes get your site penalized by Google?
A few can. Buying links, cloaking and large-scale automated content can all trigger a manual action, which shows up in Search Console and needs a reconsideration request to clear. Most mistakes aren’t penalties though. They’re just quiet underperformance, where your page ranks lower than it should and nobody tells you. That distinction matters because people sit waiting for a warning that is never going to arrive. Flat traffic usually means a hundred small problems, not one big punishment.
How long does it take to recover from an SEO mistake?
Technical fixes tend to settle within four to eight weeks, once Google has recrawled the corrected pages. Content changes take longer, because the page has to be reassessed rather than simply re-read. Manual actions are slowest, since an actual person reviews your reconsideration request and there’s a queue. The genuinely annoying part is that none of it is instant, which is why you should resist fixing five things at once. Do that and you’ll never learn which one worked.
Is keyword stuffing still a problem in 2026?
Yes, though it wears better clothes now. Hardly anyone repeats a phrase forty times any more. What turns up instead is near-identical paragraphs targeting slight variations of the same term, headings written for a crawler rather than a person, and pages that mention a concept constantly without once explaining it. The instinct behind it hasn’t changed at all. The execution is just tidier, and the page still reads like it was assembled rather than written.
Does AI-written content hurt SEO?
Not on its own. Google has said more than once that it judges content on quality and usefulness rather than on how it was produced. What does damage is unedited output published at volume, because it comes out generic and unverifiable and more or less identical to everyone else’s. The people getting good results from these tools draft and research with them, then apply actual expertise on top. The people getting bad results hit publish.
About the author
Victoria Temiz is the founder of Vita Digital, an independent SEO consultancy based in Minneapolis. She is certified in Digital Marketing and in Project Management from the University of St. Thomas, and holds an SEO credential from UC Davis Extension. She has been building and running her own websites since 2007 and has focused specifically on SEO and search since 2020. She is also a working jazz vocalist. More about her work.
