SEO Rankings Dropped: A Guide to Its Total Recovery

Running websites requires passionate dedication, like grooming someone through all-encompassing nourishment. It is well understood that you should do hard work by implying dedicated efforts to fulfill your dream of seeing your website on top of a search engine result page. How do you feel that one fine day your high-ranked website on Google, which used to showcase the products and services you dealt with after having been brought into the limelight earlier through hard-earned ranking, suddenly succumbed to an unexpected low? If your SEO rankings dropped overnight, what would you do?

If such devastating scenarios occur at any point in time, then rather than feeling panicked, you should start doing thorough introspection. It is high time you looked for the primary causes to find an appropriate solution for damage control. You will surely overcome such situations by implying appropriate measures to come out of them. Many reasons can cause SEO rankings to drop. So, start exploring the causes. The main things you need to look out for are reasons Google Rankings Suddenly Dropped.

What causes SEO ranking drops?

It would be easy to determine and find proper solutions that will prove fruitful for you when you are made aware of what caused the impromptu SEO ranking drop. You will be at the right place to determine what actions to take for recovery purposes in such situations. Don’t forget that you can’t attain consistent traffic without rankings. Without traffic or due to its slowdown, your sales will eventually start dropping. If your Google ranking dropped dramatically, then you need to search for reasons that might have caused your SEO ranking to suddenly drop.

Related: SEO is not Dead

why has my website dropped in rankings?

Do you want to know why my website has dropped in rankings? Let’s discuss some of the troubleshooting tips in this blog post. Our experts at SEO Content India advise on how to determine the reasons why your SEO rankings dropped suddenly and what effective measures to take to recover them smoothly.

1. Lost Ranking Due to Google Penalty

Keep the Google webmaster guidelines into consideration whenever you start your SEO strategies. If you don’t follow these guidelines, knowingly or unknowingly, Google will automatically or manually penalize the website. That is why it is always important for webmasters to keep reviewing them by auditing their websites to see if they are compliant with the set guidelines or not.

The market is flooded with countless Google penalty checker tools. You can get any that suits your needs and thus get this task done. Such tools will greatly help you to find out the primary reasons for the possible penalties and also what might have caused that scenario you didn’t expect.

Once you are brought to notice by finding the reasons, including cases of duplicate content and unnatural links, etc., you will have to accept Google’s decision calmly. It would be the right time to start a new strategy to fix the problem rather than get panicked unnecessarily.

Such is the process to overcome the bad phase, but you shouldn’t forget that it might take some time to resolve the issue. You need to send a reconsideration request to Google to recover from the penalties. Upon finding your case in order, you will be given a clean chit sooner.

2. SEO Ranking Dropped Due to Losing Important Backlinks

Sometimes, your website drops in SEO ranking because it loses backlinks from high-quality and authoritative websites as well. Such issues arise due to several reasons, including the following:

• The website, with your backlinks, could have shut down its business
• The website with your backlinks could have been penalized by Google
• The website with your backlinks may have been removed, updated or replaced

In such a scenario, though, you have two options: one, contact the webmasters of the said website and ask for links to be replaced. Two, start building backlinks in authority websites so that you can regain your ranking status.

3. SEO Rankings Dropped Due to Your Website’s Speed

You might have developed a great website that has SEO-optimized content and you are also practicing good SEO practices. You definitely deserve applause for that. If you still suffer a drop in SEO rankings, then it is a matter of great concern. It would be the right time to say bye-bye to your existing web hosting company and look for effective options. Perform website speed tests at regular intervals to check the performance of your website.

Google has already confirmed that website speed impacts search engine rankings. Slow websites have higher bounce rates as users don’t wait more than 10 seconds to open a website. In this digital age, you must optimize your website for mobile devices as well. A Report by SearchEngineLand reveals that nearly 60 percent of the searches are now from mobile devices.

4. Experience an SEO ranking Drop Due to the Redesign of Your Website

Sometimes, small changes on your website do matter the most. When you start doing a website redesign, it is always a smart idea to keep the 301 redirect plan in place. By doing so, you can send your visitors to new and improved pages. In this process, you also get the opportunity to inform Google to disregard the old pages and to give ranking priorities to the redesigned ones instead.

5. Google Ranking Dropped as Your Competitors Outranked You

Sometimes, losing your rankings in the SERPs doesn’t mean you have failed. It can mean that someone else did a better job this time. Improving the ranking of your website is an important task, but maintaining the SEO ranking is equally a vital job for you, which you shouldn’t underestimate.

Keep watching your competitors’ moves, and as and when possible, try to integrate best SEO practices to counter all situations. Watch and analyze the competitor websites diligently to obtain a clearer picture of what SEO strategies they use. You should thus adjust your SEO strategies accordingly in such contexts to counter the prevailing situations. It could also be one of the reasons why your rankings dropped, and learn how to fix them.

6. SEO Rankings Dropped as you Targeted the Wrong Keywords

When you created your websites, you might have used keywords from that time, but now they are no longer relevant and are outdated. This could be one of the common reasons why your search ranking & traffic might drop.

With time, search algorithms have also changed. Rather than relying on just a few keywords, search engines now promote complete sentences with a natural language to rank websites.

If you have been using old or more generic keywords until now, you need to stop working now and plan a new strategy. You should provide a solution in simple language to the questions of your prospects that they could write in a search query.

7. Google’s ranking dropped dramatically Due to Technical changes and errors

There are many technical factors, that can ruin the organic ranking of our website. You should also read about Why Your Google Rankings Dropped & How to Fix It. Make sure that search engines are still crawling and indexing your website in the same way as they were before.

Check changes in the below factors:

• HTTP status codes
• Canonical URL
• Meta robots tag
• Robots.txt
• Hreflang
• Load time
• Crawl errors

8. Google rankings dropped overnight Due to Click-Through Rate Changes

If your website’s click-through rate (CTR) has dropped, you should step back, find out the issues, and resolve those issues immediately. This could also be one of the potential reasons why Google rankings suddenly dropped. Your prospects might be leaving your website immediately because they are not satisfied with what they find. Increased bounce rate is also a great factor, due to which Google might lower your ranking.

Due to the following reasons, your CTR might have dropped:

• Do your websites take too long to load?
• Did you recently add something, including a query form or a popup, to your site?
• Have you changed your page titles & descriptions recently?

9. SEO Rankings Dropped Due to Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can badly affect your SEO. When you use duplicate content to manipulate rankings and increase traffic, in this scenario, your website can be removed entirely from Google’s index and will no longer be found in searches.

Writing no content is far better than using duplicate content. If you think about why your website is losing ranking and traffic, find out the root cause and provide a proper solution. If your content is duplicated, then you should hire a content editing service company now.

10. Organic Ranking Demoted due to On-page Issues

There are several on-page factors, such as a lot of broken links or bad internal linking, that may degrade your organic Google ranking. If you wonder why my Google ranking keeps changing, find out how to identify & solve an on-page optimization problem. On-page changes can penalize your website, even though you’re trying very hard to create high-quality content and build backlinks.

Keep your websites checked regularly and avoid such issues. Many people come to us with the query, “Why has my website dropped in rankings“.

11. Host Server Issues May Drop SEO Rankings

Google does not penalize a website if it has some temporary issues. Even if your website is down for maintenance and has some other issues for a few days, your rating should be unaffected.

However, if web crawlers are unable to visit your website for several days, it may hurt your ranking.

If you intend to take your website down for maintenance for a few days, you should configure your server to create a 503 code, which signals that the outage is only temporary. If you do not want your Google rankings to drop dramatically, then you should configure your server to create a 503 code.

Final Thoughts on SEO Rankings Dropped

Whenever your SEO rankings start dropping, the first and foremost thing for you is to find out the reason to sort out the issues rather than getting panicked. Once you find it out, you will be in a position to take corrective action to possibly reverse all the damages that have occurred. The above-mentioned tips will help you save your website at the right juncture.

Related: SEO Myths You Want to Get Rid of in 2018

If you still have any confusion and want us to explain more about why Google ranking dropped dramatically, do contact our experts for your webmasters to get a better idea and to clear up the doubts. We ascertain that by following the above-mentioned 10 checklists we prepared for you, you will indeed be closer to determining the cause of that instant drop in your website ranking. You will be in a position to restore rankings with a meticulous and strategic action plan.

A drop in the SEO ranking can be a difficult and disappointing setback for any website owner or individual entrepreneur. However, rather than viewing this as a permanent setback, it is critical to see it as an opportunity to find out SEO issues and resolve them so that you improve search engine ranking. It is possible to not only regain lost rankings but also attain higher positions in search results by doing a thorough study of the causes of the decrease and applying efficient SEO methods. So, view this setback as a learning opportunity and a digital market.

Go through the post and read Here’s What You Should Do When Your Search Rankings Dropped Dramatically.