Sudden drop in rankings is nothing new but recently I’ve heard and seen a lot of hype on various forums and discussion groups where newbies as well as experts get horrified by their sudden dropped rankings. There may be N number of reasons behind this sudden shock and it is often given by Google. Here are some most possible reasons that you may want to fix in order to recover your rankings and normal blood pressure.
But before you mess up your mind finding the reason out of the listed ones, I’d suggest you to wait for at least 1-2 weeks and let the Google complete its next update. There are 80% chances that your site rankings will be stabilized. If you’re little unfortunate for not getting your rankings back, the go ahead with these possible reasons (priority and possibility wise).
1. Backlinks From Penalized Sites Or Bad Neighborhood
Getting inbound links from websites or blogs that are penalized by Google for selling text links; or lesser content but more links, or excessive interlinking/crosslinking or the site is entirely irrelevant to your website theme or niche. You MUST NOT expect higher rankings if you’re linked to a banned blog or website. Your website may not be penalized but the sudden drop in rankings is quite expected.
To avoid this issue, make sure which site or blog you’re getting linked to. Google is not very happy with paid links and it recognizes them sooner or later. A good webmaster must not forget that Google keeps re-evaluating the links that are coming to your websites. Contextual link building is on high these days and of course one of the best ways to acquire unique backlinks (they come into paid links category too). However, if the blogs are maintained well with a quality content and strong backlinking, it is safe to get backlinks from them. Blog network owners should make posts without any backlinks or anchored texts on regular basis to gain trust and natural feel in search engines’ eyes.
2. Reduced Link Popularity
There are chances that in recent update, some of the pages with a fair pagerank linked to your website may be deleted, moved to new page or unranked page or had their PR lowered or entirely lost the pagerank. Because such linked pages were providing a significant strength to your link popularity, your rankings may drop suddenly because of any such shuffled condition.
3. Use Of Multiple Domain Names
Some new webmasters may acquire this strategy to fool search engines that may get them fall victim to penalty. They register many domains with little variation of keywords and point them all to the website for a little boost. Google and other search engines are aggressive if you violate their webmaster guidelines and Google is pretty quick in punishing such websites and webmasters. Search engines are very concerned about the quality of search results and such kind of multiple domain names simply degrades the SERPs quality. Don’t expect Google and others to reward you for this smart act if they happen to recognize (and they DO recognize)
4. Hidden Text – Another futile effort
There was a time when you could stay undetected for long or forever from search engines with the hidden text approach. You may try to fool human visitors by keeping text/keywords of same color as that of background or embedded in CSS but search engines are pretty smart and can sense what you’re doing underground. Using CSS in a legitimate manner in not a bad idea at all if you’ve relevant drop down menus (they may carry keywords) for an easy navigation but an overdo will surely get you a significant penalty and serious drop in rankings. Consider removing your text hidden under CSS wraps if it is irrelevant.
5. Mad Link Exchange And Bad Link Building
Apart from on-site optimization, link building is the only way to get rankings and link exchange is recommended of course, but it doesn’t mean you should get mad and emotional with this strategy. If you’re doing this, it is a pretty possible reason for the drop in your rankings. First of all, keep your link exchange only with related and good quality websites if not the best ones. Don’t try to use automated software link exchange programs, link farms or link directories on your websites. Some dozens of quality link exchange can do a good job for ranking rather than hundreds and thousands of quick, unrelated and low-grade links. Be fair and Google will reward your websites with fair results too.
When it comes to one-way link building, have patience and try to build 5-15 natural links everyday or on alternative days. E-zine publishing and syndication to new directories is a nice and most natural way of such kind of inbound links. If you’re using contextual link building, try getting only one or two posts a day. Google keeps updated that you’re working on your website and there are regular updates. Keep working with a slow and steady pace. If you’re too quick, it may look very unnatural and spam to search engines.
6. Text link ads:
Google has been behaving real annoyed and strict to link sellers. If you’ve been selling links, there are chances that your pagerank score may be affected or it is no longer able to pass on the pagerank strength to the buyers’ websites or pages. It is advised to get links that are embedded in relevant content rather than those on footer, sidebars or blogrolls. (I’ve experienced it as a seller. LOL. And my pagerank did get affected. Learned a lesson now and fixed the things for my clients)
7. Server Issues
If you’ve changed your hosting to a new server recently, there can be a drop in your website rankings, however, this is temporary if everything else is unchanged including content and other navigations/link pages and URLs.
But if you’ve recently made changes in websites or re-designed them, make sure your robots.txt file is working properly. If the crawler is not able to access your website pages or your server doesn’t respond for a prolonged period, it may impact your rankings for sure. If the problem is internal or your website is under maintenance for some reasons, then you must respond with code 510 that informs search engines about the issue. Also, the URLs of your newly designed pages should remain same as that of old ones.
8. Broken links
If somehow any of your internal pages is disconnected from rest of your website due to any broken link or other errors, and it is one of the most important and critical page of your website hat draws maximum traffic; then there can be a drop in rankings. Reason is; in most of the cases, a critical page tends to have many links and if such page is disconnected from site, drop in ranking can be possible. You should check your website navigation and links regularly to make sure that all links are working properly.
9. Duplicate content
Well, many of you must be wondering that this should be one of the most possible reasons of penalty or drop in rankings. But I’ve have kept it at a lower priority because most webmasters now know about this factor. There can be a drop in rankings if the content is duplicate and search engines have sniffed it.
First of all, one should avoid having same content on more than one pages of your website or other websites. Google will approve the best and first published one and will devalue all others. However, some webmasters have blogs on their websites that may have similar content, it’s better to avoid such duplicate content. If other sites are copying your content, you need not to worry much and get your content copyscape protected. It’ll help you get attested for first and original content owner.
10. Google Love To New Sites
If your site is new then Google may have showed some love to your site and it may have been ranking pretty well. But this favor may not last for long. So don’t be shocked if you find your site suddenly fly out of sight. You will have to increase the link popularity with a sound and quality link building program. While you’re ranking well with Google love, working on link building may sustain your positions then and there only.
11. Excessive Outbound Links
Much of your page strength and link juice is passed on because of these outbound links. You may consider reducing the number of such links (sp. the ones that don’t link back to you). It may be one of the least probable reasons of the drop in rankings and you may not want to leave the single possible reason.
12. Frequent Changes And Irrelevant Meta tags
It is great to have relevant and keyword optimized meta tags and you should change them if you get a better one, however, if you keep changing your meta-tags too frequently or if they don’t match the site content of your website, it may lead to a drop in your website rankings. Also, make sure that all your website pages have different meta-tags.
13. Your Competitors Are Doing Better
Okay.. That’s very obvious reason. If you don’t find any of the above reason for your dropped rankings, then your competitors may be doing really well and quality work, thus outranking you and others. Now, concentrate on getting BETTER and high-quality links rather than rushing to more links.
Lastly, not to mention, Google have been doing frequent changes in algorithms to improve the quality of search results and knock out all fuzz and fluff. If your website is adopting all legitimate SEO and promotion strategies, don’t worry if the ranking is dropped, it may be temporary as I’ve mentioned in the beginning of this article. Yahoo and msn are not very frequent with their algorithms though. It’s always better to be alert and keep an eye at the Google algorithms changes and optimize your websites accordingly.
Another thing that may be worth mentioning is to broaden your horizons. Google is no doubt the Big Boss but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t focus on Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves. These search engines bring you equally qualified traffic. They may not be as big and popular as Google but can bring you a significant number of visitors that convert. A successful online business is the one that gets traffic from all search engines. Moreover, it won’t affect you much if suddenly your rankings drop in any one of the search engines.
So, if your website rankings is dropped, DON’T PANIC. It is mere 30 minutes job to fix the issue. Relax for 15 minutes and get all webmaster senses under your control. Then take 10 minutes to have a careful look at the possible reasons and see what may be wrong. And there you got the solution within 5 minutes. Fix it and give some time to your website recover the rankings. Chills and cheers!
