Negative Ranking and Crawling Attributes

Score

Server Often Offline

3.9

The ability, or lack thereof, of the spiders being able to access the server - if the website is often unavailable to spiders, it will often be unavailable to visitors.  If a site is down for more than 48 hours, it looses rank pretty quickly.

Duplicate Content

3.7

The content of a web page is the same as or very similar to another web page - the new thinking here is that duplicate content does not get penalized, it is simply not included in the index.

External Links to Low Quality Websites

3.6

Links from your website to non trusted low quality spam websites - some say linking to a bad neighborhood flags you as a resident.  I believe that it is the ratio of good to bad links that is important.

Duplicate Meta Tags

3.4

Having multiple pages with the same title and description - Although Google attempts to extract what it can from your pages, having multiple pages with the same meta tags will negatively impact on your long tail search results.

Keyword Stuffing

3.3

The excessive use of your keywords and phrases - this need to be overdone to have a negative influence, but once the threshold has be attained, the page will be penalized.

Link Farm Participation

3.2

Attaining links through link farms or similar schemes, or selling links  - if spotted, this is frowned upon and penalizable.

Slow Server Response

2.9

The slow server inhibits the spiders progress - in my opinion this will not affect ranking, just the ability to crawl.

Inbound Links from Low Quality Websites

2.2

Links from non trusted low quality spam websites  - this is particularly bad for new, untrusted websites, once trust has been gained it is more the ratio between good links and bad links.

Low Activity Websites

2.0

Low levels of visitors and poor CTR in the SERPS  - I believe that usage data will play a more important role with time.