You spend months on your business website trying to bring it to the top of the Google results page. With high-quality content and the right SEO strategies and tactics, you grow your website and improve its ranking. Imagine one day you wake up to see that your site’s rankings have dropped significantly. It can be extremely upsetting to see that all the hard work you have done has gone down the drain.
Keep an eye out for such issues and resolve them with the help of the best SEO services company. A reliable PPC service provider who can assist you with ideal PPC strategies can bring your site’s ranking back to normal.
Reasons Why your Rankings Dropped Suddenly
1. Manual Search Engine Penalty:
Google imposes manual actions if your site does not comply with its webmaster quality guidelines. The various reasons that can lead to manual Google penalties are listed below.
Off-page negative SEO:
Your competitors can use negative SEO to decrease your site’s rankings in search engine results. Content scraping, unnatural links, site hacking, etc. are activities that come under negative SEO.
- Content scraping: Content scraping can push your page down in the search engine rankings. It includes copying content from another website to yours. If Google finds the copied content first, it can de-rank your site.
- Unnatural backlinks: Backlinks from sources that are spammy or fraud are the results of buying low-quality backlinks. It can also be because of your competitors attacking your website.
- Website hacking: The exchange of sensitive data, passwords, and files can make your website exposed vulnerable. Search engines like Google scan for malware since they value the trust of their users.
On-page violations:
Unlike off-page negative SEO, you can control on-page violations.
- Sneaky redirects: A sneaky redirect happens when you send a visitor to a URL different from the one that they requested. You can use software to check for pages with redirects to give you a list of redirected pages.
- Comment spam: Spammy comments that include links or company mentions or look out of place can impact your ranking. You can ban the accounts and remove the comments.
2. Lost backlinks:
Your website’s ranking on the search engine gets affected by acquiring low-quality links as mentioned above. Similarly, it can also get affected when you lose high-quality backlinks that you already have.
Google determines these links to be your genuine recommendation of a website to help the site’s priority in search rankings. When you lose these links, the websites that they were leading lose some of their priority in search engine results.
3. Competitors outrank you:
Sometimes there might not be anything wrong with your website. It can be that your competitors are better and they have displaced you from your position in the rankings.
Analyze your change in rankings and see how things have changed for you and your competitors. They might have employed some site-wide enhancements if they have outranked you across so many keywords.
Seek the help of the best SEO services company to find out why this has happened and resolve it.
4. User behavior changes:
A number of search patents and experiments say that behavioral metrics can influence your site rankings. It can be that your rankings have dropped due to a drop in your click-through rates.
A drop in rankings can also occur because Google decides to change its idea on the intent of a search query. Rapid changes in search behavior directly or indirectly affect the search ranking.
What To Do When your Google Rankings Drop?
1. Check for recent website changes:
If you or your team has made any large changes to your website, you can see its ranking drop. This happens if you have rewritten or redesigned your website. Talk to your team or check your project management software to see if any such changes were made.
2. Make a list of search queries:
You need to list down the search queries and pages that are affected by the rank drop to see what caused it. Scope the impact of the ranking drop using your rank tracking application, web analytics data, or Google Search Console data. Analyze the new and old rankings of the search queries and the content type that was ranking.
3. Discover who you lost your rankings to:
Your competitors are constantly trying to take over you. This can cause your listings to get pushed down the search results. Investigate who you lost your rankings to and how it happened.
Understand if your competitors have better content or faster page loading speed. See if they have won featured snippets for your targeted queries or if they provide a better user experience. Collect such findings and come up with plans to win back your ranking.
4. See if you have lost any backlinks:
Backlinks are an important ranking factor in SEO. Losing them can impact your search engine rankings negatively. There are various applications available using which you can check if you have lost any backlinks. Keep in mind that there is always some delay before such applications pick up lost links.
Monitor your backlinks with such tools and applications to stay alert when you lose backlinks.
5. Google SERP update:
Remember that Google update does not always have to be about its algorithm. Check if they have changed their search engine results page layout.
They can add to remove elements that can push down your snippet or get more attention than your snippet. Such additions and changes in elements can impact your ranking and affect your organic traffic negatively.
A tip would be to understand and imitate search behavior. See what the search engine results from page returns for the queries you are targeting.
6. Analyze the technical issues:
The technical issues that Google is facing while crawling and indexing your site can heavily impact your rankings. Google can fail to receive the information it requested due to crawl anomalies. This stops them from ranking and indexing your website content.
Conclusion
You can also take extra steps like analyzing user engagement. Such factors play an increasingly important role in Google’s algorithm. Seeing a drop in your rankings is not the end of the world. Keep calm and systematically analyze what may have caused the drop.
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