Why Is Google Dropping My Site Ranking? Few Reasons Why Google Rankings Suddenly Drops

Before you begin making changes to your website, it’s worth checking whether your rankings have actually dropped. More often than not, an unexpected shift in traffic/rankings may be a warning caused by a change within the way the info is reported. Either there was a reset in your tools, or someone on your team has messed with the settings, otherwise, you yourself have accidentally excluded a time span, a device, or a page type. therefore the initiative is to form sure that your reporting is so as.

The second step is to see whether the drop is outside the range of normal traffic fluctuations. it’s common for traffic to ebb and flow, to vary from day to day, month to month, and deteriorate over time. confirm to incorporate a minimum of a year or two of historic data and check for a pattern of comparable drops within the past.

And finally, see if the drop actually sticks. 

Once Google determines that pages on your site aren’t compliant with Google’s webmaster quality guidelines, their teams will manually take actions and then review. There are several causes of penalties, the foremost common are: your site has been hacked; the location contains user-generated spam, unnatural backlinks, thin content, or uses cloaking. you’ll determine more about each sort of manual action and the way to affect it as explained by Google.

If your rankings have dropped over 10 positions for a variety of keywords, manual penalties are the prime suspect. Log in to Google Search Console and attend the safety & Manual Actions > Manual Actions. If the location has received a manual penalty, there’ll be a note stating that the action was manual, naming the cause, and specifying affected pages.

For on-page issues, you’ll likely need to revert a number of the recent website adjustments. For off-page issues, you’ll likely need to review your backlink profile for unnatural links. If you’ve got no idea what caused the penalty, check for these common issues:

Comment spam can measurably impact your rankings. undergo the pages of your site that allow user-generated content (product reviews, blog post comments, forums) and check for spammy comments. These would usually include links, unlinked product/company mentions, or will simply appear as if they do not belong. Remove the comments, ban the accounts, and consider implementing additional measures to stop user-generated spam within the future.

Thin or scraped content

Another reason for manual actions is when you have very low-quality content. during this instance, inferiority could mean a variety of things: insufficient volume, gibberish, and/or plagiarism. Use Copyscape Plagiarism Checker to ascertain if someone is copying your content to other websites or if your writer’s copy content from other websites — both are equally bad for SEO. aside from that, confirm your content is written by hand and is of actual value to the visitors of your website.

Use WebSite Auditor to seem for redirects that take users “somewhere aside from where they expected to go”. attend Site Structure > Site Audit > Redirects and check for Pages with 302 redirects, Pages with 301 redirects, and Pages with meta refresh in your site audit. this may show you a full list of redirected pages alongside the URLs they redirect to.

Remove all unnecessary redirects. Ideally, use the sole 301s, and only in cases when the redirect is sensible for users.

The most common problem here is that the paid links that are a neighborhood of a link exchange scheme. Remove such links from your website or close them from indexing using no-follow tags. For a radical job, use WebSite Auditor and attend All Resources > External resources > HTML. this may show all of your outgoing links alongside source URLs, destination URLs, and destination status codes. Make sure you take out the list and fix the links that show as spammy.

Link exchange schemes are unlikely to happen without you knowing, a minimum of as long as you manage your site yourself. just in case you accept content contributions, confirm each of them is reviewed, which included links are natural and preferably followed.

Your website could also be hurt by backlinks coming from spammy sources. It could happen either as a result of you purchasing low-quality backlinks or as a result of your competitors attacking your website. regardless of the case, use SEO SpyGlass to get your backlink profile and check for 2 things: a recent spike within the number of backlinks and a penalty risk for every of your backlink sources.

Anything that goes over 50%  is a risk and is worth investigating. And if you discover any malicious links, simply add them to the disavow file, download the file when done reviewing, and submit it to Google’s Disavow Links Tool. Once submitted, return to look Console and request a review of your penalty.

No website is resistant to attacks by hackers and, unfortunately, most of those attacks may go unnoticed by website owners. Consult Google’s guide on the way to know if you were hacked and what you’ll do to get over various sorts of attacks.

Google tweaks its search algorithm several thousand-fold per annum. It’s rare for Google to announce algorithm updates, even the main ones, so most of them are going to be unrolled quietly. absolutely the majority of those changes are too small to note, but a couple of of them might be large enough to wreak havoc on the rankings.

In case of an enormous update, it’ll usually take a couple of days for SEOs to register unusual ranking shifts, by which era they’re going to start comparing notes with other SEOs and ask Google representatives to form a comment. Google will normally confirm the update and this information will immediately make it into SEO news platforms, like program Land and program Roundtable. confine mind that the update can also be niche-related and affect a little number of web sites. during which case, the news won’t get covered directly.

If the update is roofed within the news, you’ll find the knowledge on what the update was about and what you would like to repair to recover. Otherwise, try asking the SEO community on Reddit — the folks there are always helpful and quick to reply.

Tip! Obviously, there are no sure-fire thanks to staying safe from future Google updates that you simply ignoramus about. But one thing you’ll do is stand back from grey-hat SEO fads that do not have any purpose aside from to control rankings.

It’s also crucial to observe changes within the SERP for your niche keywords and appearance for any unusual ranking shifts. to try to that, open Rank Tracker, attend Target Keywords > Rank Tracking > SERP Analysis, and click on Record SERP data.

Once you are doing this, Rank Tracker will record the highest 30 search results for every one of your keywords and display changes on the Fluctuation Graph. The graph can actually show fluctuations for different keywords, and all keywords in your project, or both.

It is possible that nothing is wrong together with your website, it’s just that your competitors got better. While rarely an explanation for a dramatic drop by rankings, competitor activity is worth investigating if you’ve got dropped a couple of positions across the board.

Use Rank Tracker’s SERP History to ascertain how the rankings have changed for you and your competitors. If the changes are chaotic (new websites, frequent shifts, tons of movement), then you’re likely experiencing a Google dance — a brief period of high SERP volatility thanks to small algorithm tweaks. during this case, no action is required. But if you see many of your positions being overtaken by an equivalent few websites, then it is time for an in-depth investigation.

If the competitor has outranked you across an outsized number of keywords, then they need probably implemented some site-wide enhancements. during this case, run their website through the web site Auditor and therefore the SEO SpyGlass and see if the competitor outperforms you either in technical optimization or within the size and quality of their backlink profile.

If you’ve got seen shifts across a couple of keywords, then the cause is perhaps on-page optimization. The competitor is probably going to update their pages one by one, improving content, optimizing keywords, headers, and HTML tags. during this case, visit the pages in question, see how they compare to your own pages, and borrow optimization ideas.

Tip! Tracking your main competitors is nearly as important as tracking your own site. As you track rankings and run both on-page and off-page audits, confirm to also audit competitor sites to ascertain and understand their progress and therefore the tactics they use. If they’re steadily growing, it means they’re doing something right — which suggests you’ve to adapt your own strategies accordingly, albeit they haven’t outranked you yet.

Just as acquiring new, low-quality links can impact your performance in SERPs, so can losing the high-quality backlinks you have already got. to see if lost backlinks are the rationale your rankings dropped, open SEO SpyGlass, and attend Summary > New/Lost Backlinks History. The graph allows you to assess your backlink situation at a look and see if there are any critical losses.

Next, switch to the Backlinks tab and click on on the header of the Links Back column to sort the backlinks by status. Search for any links with a ‘link is missing’ status — those are the lost backlinks which may have caused the difficulty. you’ll also consult the Last Found Date to ascertain when the backlink was last reported to be present on the page.

If you are looking to reclaim lost backlinks, the logical thing to try to do is to urge in-tuned with the webmaster. How you are doing this relies on the character of the backlinks. does one have a relationship with the location owner? If so, a fast call could also be all it takes to urge the link back. If you are not conversant in the webmaster, then email, Twitter, or LinkedIn are your best bet.

Tip! the likelihood of losing your backlinks is yet one more reason to watch your link profile regularly. After all, if you discover a link was lost right after it had been removed (and not four months later), the webmaster is way more likely to recollect that they removed the link and understand your concern.

Making essential changes to your site — like redesigning it, changing your CMS, or moving to HTTPS — is about bound to mess together with your rankings. a little oversight may have serious consequences for your SEO performance and end in a measurable drop.

If you’ve got recently implemented site changes, open Google Search Console, and attend Index > Coverage. a pointy increase in either errors or warnings that correspond to the dates of site changes should confirm your suspicion.

Normally Google logs and tells you all discovered crawling and also indexing issues within the Coverage tab, so it’s fairly easy to find and solve the problem.

Tip! Use the web site Auditor alongside Search Console to see for HTTPS issues, 4xx pages, redirect chains, and a number of other technical problems that may result from website changes.

Google representatives often say that behavioral metrics are too noisy to influence rankings, but a variety of search patents and multiple real-life experiments say otherwise. So, while we understand that this could be controversial, there’s an opportunity that a number of your ranking drops could also be explained by a drop by your click-through rates.

To check if this is often so, open Google Search Console, attend Performance > search results, and see if there are any changes to your click-through rates. you’ll view your CTR for the whole website or add filters to look at CTRs either by page or by the query.

If you see a drop by the CTR, it’s either because your competitors have improved their snippets and stolen a share of your clicks, or because the intent of the query has shifted and your snippet doesn’t look as relevant because it won’t to.

Whatever the case, attend the SERP in question and see how your snippet measures up to the snippets of your competitors. counting on what you discover, you would possibly need to optimize your title and meta description or use schema markup to reinforce your snippet with rich elements.

SEM traffic comes from paid advertisement while SEO traffic comes from organic search, and sometimes one can get within the way of the opposite. Your ads are given priority in SERP and haven’t any problem stealing a large share of traffic from your own organic results.

Compare the list of keywords in your PPC campaigns with people who bring you organic traffic. If you notice any duplicate keywords, don’t hesitate to pause the PPC campaigns that they are available from. Because why buy the traffic that you simply can get for free of charge.

Google has been recently been enhancing its search results with brainy panels, good snippets, questions and answer sections, video clips, products page, job ads, and much other stuff. While those things are of benefit to the user, they are doing deduct from organic search results.

To see if you’ve got fallen victim to at least one of such enhancements, open Rank Tracker and attend Target Keywords > Rank tracking > SERP Analysis. The dashboard will show you the history of SERP enhancements, allowing you to ascertain if any of them correspond to your ranking changes:

If it’s like new SERP features have had an impression on your positions, then it’s probably time to find out how you’ll use structured data to reinforce your snippets and either compete with the rich features introduced by Google or even become a neighborhood of them.

Let me know if I even have missed any of the causes for a sudden drop by rankings. I’m curious to listen to if you have ever experienced a dramatic drop yourself and what has been your course of action. Meanwhile, bookmark this list for a time period, and let’s hope you never need to actually use it. Cheers!