Blogging is fun, whether you’re blogging for personal reasons or running a business, but there are always pitfalls waiting to catch you when you least expect. Some pitfalls are easy to recover from, but others aren’t.
Don’t want to be caught off guard? Here’s a list of the 3 biggest pitfalls to avoid as a blogger.
1. Getting blacklisted by Google
Realizing your entire website has been blacklisted by Google is probably the worst thing that could ever happen. Some blogs get blacklisted for good reason – usually for spam – but sometimes it happens to well-meaning blogs. Provided you’re not running an illegal business or a link farm, here are two big reasons your site might get blacklisted:
· Your site has been hacked and is running malware. Hackers routinely run phishing schemes from hacked WordPress websites, usually getting in through vulnerable plugins. The minute you find out your site has been compromised, clean it up without hesitation.
By removing malware from your blog immediately, you’ll avoid getting your blog blacklisted by Google. Google doesn’t always put sites on their list of malicious sites right away. It takes time. However, since you may not be aware of just how long your blog has been compromised, it’s wise to clean it as quickly as possible.
· Your domain is associated with spam emails. It’s possible that someone has been using your web-based email to send spam emails. If you only use an email client and never check your outgoing folder inside of your hosting account’s webmail, you won’t know anything’s wrong until there are consequences.
Since the most common reason for a blacklisted site is malware, check for malware first. Most likely, your hosting provider will quickly suspend your account and let you know it’s infected. If you’re running WordPress, you can use MalCare to clean it up, or hire a professional to do the job for you.
2. Losing your affiliate products
Once in a while, affiliate products disappear. It doesn’t matter how long they’ve been on ClickBank, or if you had a private deal with a company. At some point, you’re going to lose at least one affiliate product. What you don’t want is to be stuck with a website you can’t use to sell other products.
If your entire website has been built around one affiliate product, and you can’t easily substitute that product for another, you’ll struggle if your product ever disappears.
Before you have that experience (nobody is immune), start restructuring your website so that you can insert a new affiliate product link into your pages with minimal editing. This might be hard if you’ve named all of your page URLs after the brand.
It makes sense to have some URLs named after a specific brand when you’re selling that product. However, if you have 100 blog posts and all of those URLs contain the brand name of one product, you’ll want to change some of those to general URLs and apply 301 redirects.
If your original brand goes out of business, you can swap out the product links and description, but you’ll have 100 URLs that don’t match your new product and this will confuse your visitors. It can also deter clicks from search engines if people know your original brand is gone.
3. Dropping away from publishing content
The jury is still out on the exact science behind publishing regular content to make search engines happy. Some say you need to publish content weekly, others say monthly. Regardless of how often you post content, don’t just stop randomly.
Even if it won’t affect your ranking in the search engines, halting content production can disappoint your regular visitors who come back looking for more content periodically. If you post on a regular schedule, your visitors will get used to that.
Life can get busy and creating content can become a challenge. Prepare for that ahead of time by creating more content than you plan to publish. Keep a stash of content on hand that will cover you for at least a few months, if not a year.
If that seems like too much to plan ahead for, consider how easy it is to get behind schedule and allow four or even six months to go by without publishing content. With a year’s worth of content, you could make it through just about any disruption to your life and your blog will never suffer.
Be prepared with knowledge
As long as you’re aware of the pitfalls you might encounter with your blog, you should have an easy time avoiding them. Hopefully, you can avoid the pitfalls outlined in this article and keep your blog up and running without any major problems.
