Surfing through the analytics section and seeing your rank drop can be quite depressing. Your Google rankings can drop because of a lot of factors. Reasons may vary; competition from other websites, changes in Google’s algorithm, or an intended action from Google are some of the causes that might lower your traffic.
Here is a list of reasons why your Google rankings dropped
- Changes in Google’s algorithm.
- Google has penalized your website.
- The content on your page has changed.
- Someone has hacked your site.
- Someone has published higher quality content.
- A decline in user experience
1. Changes in Google’s algorithm
The most common assumption when the ranking of a site drops drastically is that Google has made changes in the search algorithm. Blog outreach services, However, it is complicated to confirm it because Google makes a ton of changes in their algorithm per year and seldom lets the users know in detail. You can't ensure if your ranking has dropped due to an algorithm change unless Google explicitly mentions that it has changed or what has been done with that change. Check if other site owners and SEOs are reporting likely algorithm changes.
2. Google has penalized your website
Google can manually drop your rankings if it finds out that your website's content violates its webmaster quality guidelines. However, it is infrequent for a manual action to lower your website's ranking, and also, it is straightforward to diagnose.
Visit Google Search Console to check if you have been issued a manual action, expand the "security and manual actions" tab, and then click on "Manual actions."
Check if it says "no issues detected," if it is, so that means Google has not penalized your site.
However, suppose Google has manually dropped your site's ranking. In that case, it will mention why Google has lowered your website's rank and instructions on how to recover and resubmit the site for consideration. It is essential that you quickly fix the issue so that your site gets back in the results soon. Also, Google provides 12 reasons why sites can be issued a manual penalty; the most notable reasons are purchasing backlinks or things that other users did, such as spamming in the comment section.
3. The content on your page has changed
If you have frequently changed things on your website, a rank drop is very much possible; if you don't want it to drop, it's better to update old content and optimize it with new and different keywords. It would help if you gave it a couple of weeks to see how it finally ranks.
4. Someone has hacked your site
Even though it is one of the rarer causes, yet it's very much possible. Open google console, expand the security and manual actions and click security issues. If it says no problems detected, then your site is not hacked. It is crucial to recover a hacked site. You are not only putting your site in danger but also its potential viewers.
5. Someone has published higher quality content.
Often your ranking gets dropped when someone publishes content that Google believes is of higher quality than yours. Also, several other reasons, such as the other content has more backlinks, are more up to date, better optimized for search. If you think this is the cause of your ranking drop, you can use the MozBar browser extension to compare the number of links directed towards your site and links referred to other search results.
6. A decline in User Experience
Several user experience issues exist, but the two most important problems are mobile-friendliness and page load speed. It's possible for a page to load slowly and lose its mobile-friendliness if you have recently altered the page's content. You can always check your page's loading speed by using
PageSpeed Insights, and you can take care of the mobile-friendliness issues in the "Mobile Usability" report, which you can find in Google Search Console. If there are issues you need to correct, Google will provide a complete description of those issues in the Google search console.
Conclusion
Finding out the actual reason for a drop in your website's ranks can be quite time consuming and frustrating, so the best way to ensure your website does not drop in the rankings is to do everything you can in your power to circumvent them.
Go through Google's webmaster quality guidelines. Acquaint yourself with Google's Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. Keep yourself updated with the Google Webmaster Central Blog. Avoid doing things that could lead to a manual action. Make your website both user and Google friendly.