Just Imagine, one day early in the morning you do a Google search for your website and what you find out is that your site’s hard-earned Google Rankings have suddenly dropped off. Sometimes, you only blame yourself that you didn't try your best to avoid getting into this situation. But in many cases, it is not in your hands as you just can’t be aware of the possible scenarios in which your site may lose search traffic.
However, the most important thing to keep in mind is that whenever your site’s rankings start dropping you should keep calm and start looking for the causes and their solutions. It’s obviously a matter of concern but it’s definitely not the end of your site. You need to understand first why your site might bleeding. It could be because of the following reasons:
A. Google has Penalized the Website
B. Your website may have some issues which can lead to the ranking drop
The first thing which needs to be done is to assess the situation and understand what is broken on your website. In the following article, I am going to cover some of the most important methods which could save your website from Ranking Drop. Here are 6 important reasons "why your site may have lost it's Google Ranking" as well as the ways to address this drop.
1. Manual or Algorithmic Penalty Rank Drop
How would you Diagnose a Google Penalty?
This comes as a big drop in search engine rankings which happens over-night. If you come to notice a sudden drop in ranking by more than 10-20 positions and that is also on many keywords then this could indicate a Google Penalty. There are two types of penalties 1.Algorithmic, & 2.Manual. The main difference between the two is that the first ones are automatic and comes up with various Google Updates, while the second ones are applied manually by one of the Google employees. Google usually update its algorithms without clearly stating it earlier, so you should constantly keep monitoring your website’s ranking changes. You will know that you’ve been penalized by Google if the drop is harsh and your site continues to rank on other search engines i.e. on Bing or Yahoo.
How to Identify & Recover from Google Penalty?
For identifying exactly what happened, the first step would be to check your Google Webmaster Tools account. In this tool you’ll get notifications from Google regarding their manual actions which they’ve taken against your website. You’ll have to check that if there are notifications in the Site Messages menu or not. You’ll be alerted here if there are any issues that GoogleBot has been detected.
Moreover, you should also check the section of Manual Actions from Google Webmaster Tools because it is the only place where you’re going to be announced about the Google penalties applied to your site. You should accept their decision with calm and then proceed to solving the issue. In this procedure, to identify that what exactly harmed your website is the first thing which you need to do.
If it is on-page then you need to reconsider your content and links as well as check if there isn’t any duplicate content. In case it is off-page then you need to detect and remove the unnatural links. For recovering from manual penalties, you’ll need to submit a reconsideration request however, it may take some time to regain your position in the Search Engine.
How to Prevent from a Google Penalty?
You should continuously track your links as well as the risk of being penalized with the help of specialized tools that alert you when something strange starts to happen on your link profile.
2. OutRanked by a Competitor
How to Diagnose
This is not a very big matter of concern because it is usually a slight drop in ranking. Here you will notice that your competitor’s site that has outranked you is above and the other websites are in the same positions as before.
Identify the Outranking Issue
For identifying the issue you need to constantly monitor and analyze your competitor’s websites and their social profiles so that you can get a better insight into what are they doing.
How to Prevent from Outranking Issue
If you properly track your main competitors and try to understand their link building strategies there are chances to predict their next moves.
â— You or your SEO Experts should keep a close eye on their content creation and link building strategies.
â— If your competitors are steadily growing then it means that they’re doing something right. So, what you can do is to understand their tactics and adapt your strategies accordingly. You need to be very diverse and creative with your content strategies when you want to differentiate yourself from rest of the competitors.
3. Demotion of website due to On-page Issues
How to Spot the issue?
This could be either a big drop or may be the site can’t grow in rankings, so it may be a sign of concern when your site’s rankings start to fall behind others, when you’re seriously trying your best to create good content and link building process.
How to solve an On-page Optimization Problem?
For checking out for the on-page issues in your site you should look out in Google Webmasters Tool and understand the problems from there first of all. There you may get a lot of broken links or bad internal linking. There you may need to use the HTML Improvements in order to detect any problems with tags. Also check for PageSpeed Insights to gain the valuable information on what problems your site may have and how you can fix them. All of these can be found in Google Webmaster Tools.
How to Prevent On-page problems?
Always track your site in Google Webmasters Tools and have GWT notifications enabled or enable it to send notifications to your email address. If you practice doing this then, the chances of being a victim of on-page issues will definitely decrease.
4. Website Rank Dropped due to Losing Links
How this Demotion looks? ​
This could be a slight drop or a big one. You will witness huge spikes in the velocity of link, as you’ll get numerous inbound links disappearing from your link profile.
How to Identify and Solve this Drop?
To identify & solve the issue you need to check your website’s lost links in the last 90 days. If there are a lot of lost links then this might indicate the ranking drop. You can check those links individually. If you find that those links were removed intentionally by webmasters then this might be a red flag to Google that those links were unnatural links. In this case you shouldn’t ask them back, as Google may penalize you in the future. Instead you should make some more high quality links to your website.
How to Prevent these rank Demotions?
For preventing this situation you should track your lost links actively by using some specialized software. If you do this regularly you will be aware of the issue before it is too late. By monitoring the link velocity you can figure out the things and act accordingly.
5. Google Just Updated Their Algorithm
How would you diagnose this Google Drop?
Due to algorithm update your ranking might be scratched a little or sometimes you may be in a very serious trouble. In either case, you might suspect that it is due to algorithmic update because your rankings are suddenly and rapidly dropping.
How to Identify a Google Update? ​
For identifying that it happened due to an Algorithmic update you need to check the SEO news sites for some news related to a possible update in that particular timeframe. After finding the information, apply those findings to your own site. You need to understand here that what has changed in the algorithm and in what ways your website is violating the Google’s guidelines.
How to prevent being hit by a Google Update? ​
For preventing yourself from getting into these kinds of issues you need to be as organic as possible and build a brand. You need to focus on your product, community as well as the technical issues with your site.
6. Google Flux
What is a Google Flux? ​
Google flux is one of those things that you have no power over. This is a very unpredictable and volatile issue, so you shouldn’t be on the lookout for any signs.
The above image is an example of a Google Flux that you might interpret incorrectly as a negative SEO attack.
How to Identify a Google Flux? ​
Google flux is usually harder to spot because you will find that everything should be looking ok. You will be finding nothing like:
â— No On-page issues
â— No link building issues
â— No competitor outrank issues and
â— No known algorithm update
There isn’t any thumb rule on how to handle the Google flux issues but don’t worry in these cases as your Google Website Ranking might be back on the same position in a few days.
How to Prevent?
If I frankly speak then you simply can’t prevent these issues as it is out of your control and I will suggest that you shouldn’t spend too much time in trying to find the reason for this happening. These fluxes are very normal for any site and the good thing is that if it is a Flux you will be back up in a few days.
Final Words…
The smartest website owners are one step ahead because they adapt precautions on how they market their websites. So, don’t get tempted of quickly jump on the first position through not authoritative SEO strategies and keep yourself updated with the current updates. These are by far the best things you can do to protect your rank drop and grow your visibility in the search engines. The most surprising strategy which you can adapt and which seems to be fruitful in this volatile SEO world is to stay always informed or take help of Best SEO Services Company in India. Read the above article and keep your Google Search Ranking Secure.
