Your search engine rankings are important. If you’ve suddenly found your website dropping in the rankings, here are some steps you can take to reverse the trend, and more importantly, prevent it from happening in the first place.
Every site’s rankings drop from time to time, and there can be plenty of reasons behind it. But whether you’re a seasoned expert or a newbie, a sudden drop in rankings can be cause for concern. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the more common reasons for a drop in rankings, and the steps you can take to overcome the situation.
But before you start taking drastic action, we suggest that you wait for the next Google update, generally 1 to 2 weeks. The vast majority of the time, about 80% in fact, your site rankings will stabilize. If they haven’t, or if you don’t have the time to wait, review these reasons to see if you can correct the issue.
The Problems With Backlinks
Link exchanges and link buildings are appropriate ways to market your site, but common sense and caution must prevail. Remember, the best links to your site are given freely from sites that are well-maintained and that provide quality content in the same area of interest as your site. Blog owners should be making posts that do not contain links or have anchored text. True contextual link building is what you should be striving for, along with on-site optimization.
Here are some common problems that can arise when other sites—websites or blogs—link to your site. Even if your site is not penalized because of one of these factors, your rankings will drop.
• Penalized neighborhood: Expect a drop in your rankings if the site linking to you has been banned or penalized by Google.
• Paid links: Expect a drop in your rankings if the site linking to you is known by Google for selling text links.
• Excessive links: Expect a drop in your rankings if the site linking to you offers mostly links but very little in the way of content.
• Off topic links: Expect a drop in your rankings if the site linking to you focuses on a theme or niche that is totally unrelated to your site’s content.
• Reduced popularity of linking site: Expect a drop in your rankings if a formerly well-ranked site linking to you has had their page rank lowered or lost it entirely.
• Lost linking page: Expect a drop in your rankings if a well-ranked site linking to you has moved or deleted the page that linked to you. This is the kind of thing that could be resolved during the next Google update.
• Link exchange gone wrong: Expect a drop in your rankings if you’re promoting your site through software link exchange programs, link farms or link directories. Rather than getting hundreds or thousands of quick, unrelated, and poor quality links in this way, strive to have several dozen good quality websites linking to your site. This is one instance when quality really does matter more than quantity.
To avoid backlink problems, take a look at the sites that are linking to you. The best web masters recognize that Google is constantly re-evaluating backlinks and websites.
Problems With Your Inbound Links
Google recognizes when you are working on your website and providing regular updates. Avoid looking like you are spamming by working at a natural, steady pace. Aim for between 5 and 15 natural links every day or every other day. One of the best sources of inbound links is publishing e-zine articles or syndicating your articles to reputed directories. For contextual link building, aim for 1 to 2 posts each day or 5 posts a week for best results. One of my another post on better contextual link building program may help you in this regard.
Have you been selling links on your page? Google can be strict in these kinds of circumstances. Not only will your page rank plummet, but you won’t be doing any good for the buyers either. You’re better off with relevant links embedded in your content than using footers, side bars, or blog rolls.
It is not likely that you will drop in page rankings because you have too many outbound links, but it is possible that that is one factor. Consider your outbound links and see if each is needed; you may want to get rid of any that don’t link back to you, for example.
Multiple Domain Names
Remember that any trick a web master can think of to artificially increase their page rank, Google can also think of. If you have registered multiple domain names using slight variations of your main keywords and use those sites to point to your main site, you can expect Google to figure it out and down rank your site accordingly. Search engines are only as good as the results they provide, and most are very aggressive when it comes to enforcing their guidelines.
Hidden Text
You may be able to fool a human visitor if you use text or keywords that match your background, but a search engine won’t be fooled. The same goes for embedding keywords in CSS (cascading style sheets). Using CSS for relevant drop down menus which may include keywords is an appropriate aid to navigating your site, but do not overdo it. If you’re using CSS to hide keywords though, you should probably consider removing them to avoid a penalty and drop in rankings.
Site Issues
There are some issues with your site than can affect your page rank.
- A change to a new hosting service or sever can result in a temporary drop in rankings. As long as your content remains unchanged and your navigation/link pages and URLs are the same, this should resolve with the next Google update.
- Make sure your robots.txt file is working properly whenever you have made changes to your server, website or had a redesign. Your rankings are negatively impacted if the crawler cannot access your website pages or your server does not respond in an appropriate amount of time.
- If you are having internal or server problems, or if your site is down for maintenance, respond to search engines with a code 510.
- Make sure all your internal links are working, especially links to your internal pages from your landing page. If your landing page is somehow disconnected from its destinations, your rankings can drop. In fact, it is a good idea to regularly check your website navigation and links to make sure everything is working properly.
- Update your keywords and meta-tags when you find something better, but don’t change them just for the sake of change or your ranking can drop. Each page on your website should have a different meta-tag.
Repetition and Redundancy
This is less of a problem for established websites because most web masters know about the penalties and drop in rankings that duplicate content can cause. If you publish multiple blogs, avoid duplicating content even if topics are similar. When it runs into duplicate content, Google will rank the best and first published version only.
Other sites copying your content? Copyscape can help you show you were first and get you the recognition you deserve as first and original owner of the content in question.
The Honeymoon’s Over
Google often favors new sites with good rankings. Once that honeymoon period is over, however, you may drop out of favor. Only good quality link building programs will keep your site ranked highly. So take advantage of the honeymoon period to work on building quality links to sustain your position.
Tough Competition
If you’ve given some thought to the reasons listed above and nothing seems to fit, it may be that your competition is really tough and there are sites producing quality work that simply outrank you. Do not think more links are the answer. No, the answer is better links and legitimate SEO and promotion strategies. Also, this is a problem which the next Google update may resolve as well.
To improve the quality of its search results, Google frequently changes and updates are algorithms. Keep an eye on these changes so you can respond accordingly. Yahoo and MSN do not change their algorithms as frequently, nor do they get as much traffic. You’re better off optimizing your site according to Google algorithms.
Speaking of other search engines, you should not count out other search engines, including Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves. These search engines are not as big or popular as Google has become, but their traffic is still good for your site. In fact, a truly successful site will get traffic from a number of different search engines. Getting visitors from multiple search engines will also make your page ranking less vulnerable to drops in rankings.
As you have seen, there are quite a few different reasons for your page ranking to drop, and most of these can be fixed easily and quickly. When your page ranking drops, step one is simple: don’t panic. Spend a little time considering the different factors that could be behind the drop, and then spend a few minutes making the necessary corrections. Your website rankings—not to mention your nerves—will recover in no time!
