There are many reasons why a website’s Google ranking drops over time. understanding the most common causes can help you fix the problem.
Nothing is more frustrating than a sudden drop in organic search engine rankings for companies and website owners. This is a common problem in the SEO industry. The problem is that it is hard to pinpoint the exact reason for the sudden drop in Google rankings. Many factors can contribute to this, including changes in search engine algorithms, marketing problems, and even manual penalties from Google. Fortunately, in order to identify the problem’s cause, there are steps you can take. For some of the most common reasons for a sudden drop in your Google ranking and how to identify it, see below:
Lack of up-to-date content
One of the most common reasons for the decline in Google rankings is the lack of up-to-date content. Search engines, including Google, give priority to websites that provide valuable, timely, and relevant content. If you haven’t added new content to your website for a while, your ranking may have dropped. To solve this problem, include a regular content creation schedule in your website maintenance plan.
Outdated coding and design elements
Another common reason for poor Google rankings is outdated coding and design elements. Websites that use outdated technologies or methods may be penalized and ranked less on Google. To keep your website up to-date and optimized for search engines, you need to keep your code up to date and use the latest technology.
Search engine algorithms change
As search engine algorithms are constantly changing and evolving, ranking fluctuations may occur. To determine if this is the cause of your problem, you can keep an eye on industry news and SEO forums for any updates that may affect your site.
Technical Issues
Your ranking may drop if your website has technical issues such as broken links, slow page loads, or server errors. We may conduct a technical audit of your site to investigate this issue.
Manual Penalties
If you’ve recently received a manual penalty from Google, it could be the cause of your sudden drop in rankings. To check if this is the case, you can look at Google Search Console to see if the action has been taken directly on your website.
Competitors
If your competitors are gaining ground in the SERPs, this could be why your ranking suddenly drops. To investigate this issue, you can compare your SEO strategy to your competitors and find areas where you can gain an edge.
Off-page negative SEO
Negative SEO aims to lower the ranking of your competitor’s website in search engine results. These activities usually include intentional spam creation, unnatural links to sites, content scraping, and even site hacking. Successful negative SEO attacks rarely happen, but when they do, they can lead to significant ranking drops for a significant number of keywords. It’s best to manually check each one before rejecting risky-looking backlinks. If the negative SEO attack you see is based on backlinks, first contact the owner of the connecting domain and ask them to remove the toxic backlinks. If that doesn’t help, it’s best to disavow spam links using Google’s custom opt-out tool.
Link structure
Finally, link structure can also be a major factor in your low ranking on Google. Search engines use links to crawl web pages, so if your site has a bad link structure or too many broken links, your ranking may drop. Check your website regularly for broken links, and if you find one, replace it with a working link as soon as possible.
One final reason that may affect your ranking is that Google is changing its search engine results pages. This happens once a week, but there’s still a chance that Google will start answering some queries from the search results.
Lately, Google is increasingly expanding its search results with knowledge panels, rich snippets, Q&A sections, video clips, product pages, job postings, and many more. These things help users but hurt organic search results. To see if you’ve been a victim of one of these improvements, open Rank Tracker and go to Target Keywords > Rank Tracking > SERP Analysis. The dashboard shows your SERP improvement history so you can see if it matches your ranking changes. If you feel like a new SERP feature has impacted your position, you can use structured data to improve your snippets and compete with or be part of the wealth of features Google offers.
If your Google ranking suddenly drops, it’s important to take the time to analyze the problem and determine the root cause. With the right approach and careful investigation, you can get to the bottom of the matter and restore your ranking.
A drop in Google rankings may be a legitimate cause for concern, but it may not be what you think. Before tackling a Google ranking drop, it’s important to see if your Google ranking dropped overnight. How do you do this?
Use Google Analytics to see your weekly traffic average deviation over the past 6-12 months. You should also check your Google rankings and organic search traffic using Google Search Console. If your traffic drops dramatically, the problem is real and you need to take action to prevent further traffic loss.
Google updates its search algorithms daily and provides major updates almost every month. This means that these updates can affect all websites, even if you haven’t made any changes to your site. Some of these Google updates bring positive reviews (rarely), but it’s likely a temporary drop in ratings.
Unfortunately, there’s not much anyone can do about these updates, but the best way to minimize your site’s downgrade is to constantly update your content and keep an eye on your competitors to see if your site provides more useful information to end users.
You can also look closely at your site performance with Google Analytics and see if your ranking has declined because of recent changes to your site structure or other site parameters, looking for other clues to your ranking decline. Enroll in a digital marketing course in Thrissur and explore more about the ever-changing landscape of the digital marketing industry.
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