I’m often amused by just how much flak the search engines get. After all, they provide users with a valuable free service and, in my opinion, they serve up solid results the majority of the time.

But for the most part, the engines continue to take heat from users, site owners, marketers and advertisers. These people never seem to be short on criticism, as folks always are more than willing to gripe about what they don’t like. But rarely, if ever, do the engines fire back.

Now, I’m not saying that search engines are perfect — far from it — but I do think they deserve a pat on the back for continuing to innovate with the goal of providing a better user experience. So instead of telling you how to optimize your site for the engines, I thought it would be fun to turn the tables, and let you know what annoys the search engines, and how you can remedy the situation.

Below are five things that site owners/marketers frequently do that drive the engines crazy.

1. Provide generic or useless content

By and large, search engines have the same goal: They want to provide users with the most relevant content possible. How-ever, a large number of sites have content that provides little value to users and does nothing to help the engines meet their goal. This can be a problem — for you.

If your exact content can be found on another site, then you shouldn’t have it. If you receive syndicated content, you need to put your own twist on it to add value. But keep in mind that simply changing images, wrapping content in a frame and changing the color palate does not constitute adding value.

I suggest that you go through your site and audit your content. If you find that your content is unique and provides value to users, then — congratulations — you are one-fifth of the way toward garnering approval of the engines. However, if you have a significant amount of generic content, you need to devise a way to differentiate it.

One of the most common objections I hear on this topic comes from retailers who, along with all of their competitors, display manufacturers’ specs and product description verbatim. A great strategy to combat this problem is to add user reviews or editorial snippets to your product pages. Doing so not only will serve to differentiate your content, but also the engines and users will appreciate the fact that your content provides value.

 

2. Implement redirects, confusing code and more

Crawling the Web and indexing its content is no small feat; clearly, search engines have a huge job. In fact, when you think about the sheer number of pages they have indexed, and that they continue to update on a regular basis, their task is nothing short of daunting.

So how do some marketers repay them for their efforts? Perhaps a box of fine chocolates? Ummm … no. Maybe a handwritten note? Nope. Perhaps a good bottle of wine? Ah, that would be … another no. Instead, they actually make the process of crawling and indexing their content more difficult. How so? They implement items such as a series of redirects and cumbersome code, they don’t return 404 errors, and — most annoyingly — they serve spiders the same page over and over again because of unique session IDs.