Very funny and interesting thread as well on digital point forums. “How to ruin a web site”, users has tons of ideas, most of them are … well let’s call it silly, however it is a enterteining thread and shouldn’t be treated as source of knowledge, however i would like to share with you some common ways to ruin your website, tha are not so obvious, but still people destroy thier websites and have no idea that they did.

1. Changing link structure, without making proper redirections, this is very common when someone has 10 000 links indexed in search engine, and reads somewhere on the net that if he just use Apache mod_rewrite to make his URLs look nice then he will attract more visitors, of course  poor reader do not realizes that actually he will loose all readers because all indexed links will become 404 pages.
2. Allow SPAM comments or just not filtr comments at all this is an easy way to get tons of links on your website that point to websites with viagra and porn advertisments, not to mention how completely unproffessional such site looks.
3. Make all content in <b> or <strong> tag, this is a sure way to get banned by search engines, no matter how good your content is.
4. Keep your title in format <title>Web site general name | category title | article title</title>, instead of <title>article title</title> i know that a lot of people know that, and i did too, but by default Wordpress is using the first format, and i didn’t realized it until few weeks ago, after changing title tags my search engine traffic improved, so check your title’s to see if you are loosing visitors or not
5. The last one is choosing bad hosting company with a lot of downtimes this very frustrating, but can be and should be handled quickly, just read some reviews on the web. Another variation of this is using free web hosting.

This list could go on and on, but i listed just those that i had personal experience with in one way or another, hope that this will help you identifiy errors that are holding your site from getting good rankings. Or even better if you find out that you did not make any of those mistakes at all :).