A drop in Google ranking can sometimes happen in the blink of an eye: One day, your website was showing up on the top three rank of search results, and by the next day your site may not be on the first page. If your business calls depend on visibility of your website in the search engines to bring bulk of your visitors, then this scenario can be quite frightening. It’s especially terrifying if you have no idea why ranking is dropping. There are many reasons why a site’s ranking might suffer an abrupt plunge, and the majority of them can be remedied with a bit of time and effort. Let’s look at some of the most common issues that could cause a site’s ranking to plummet.
You need to understand why your site might be bleeding. There are many reasons why website can lose rankings and traffics. One of the most common reasons is a Google algorithm penalty. If your website was penalized by the algorithm, that means you have done something wrong with your website’s ON-page and OFF-page SEO. Maybe the content is not as good as your competitors, maybe you were too aggressive with link building, and maybe you have been using SEO techniques that are against Google guidelines.
Another reason why traffics and Google rankings can drop is some sort of technical problem.
If your website is hacked, Google might consider it not safe and might remove it from their search results.
Slow and unreliable web hosting can also result in losing Google rankings.
Other technical problems such as redirects went wrong, disallowing Google bot from crawl your site, or partial or entire indexing of your website can also result in losing traffic.
- Plagiarism can also affect your website ranking.
Everyone knows importance of having a good quality website, there are many who choose to directly copy content from other similar and successful websites. However, a plagiarism is one of the worst things that can happen to a website, and carries high penalty from Google. Such websites can be barred from appearing anywhere on the search engine. In the event of a dropped ranking, it is good to check for duplicate content. If any plagiarized content is found, it’s best to remove such links.
- Keyword stuffing: Easy to do – a pain to fix.
If you are placing lots of keywords into your pages (purely for the purposes of manipulating search results), then beware. A result of the Penguin update in 2011, Google penalizes websites which are guilty of keyword stuffing. This also goes for hidden content – any text which is on page but invisible to the user.
- Website speed
Do you know why Google cares how fast your site loads? They noticed that when they rank slow loading websites, users tend to have a bad experience, which causes them to use Google less…and that means less income for Google. It is very important that your website should be responsive.
Website speed also affects your page rank on google, its better you optimize your page accordingly.
- Are you using excessive rich anchor text over using key anchor text? This could be another reason why your website may have been penalized. If you have lots of the same anchor text going to URLs on your site, then Google sees it as spam.
This doesn’t mean you have to change all anchors to say, “click here.” Just be aware that Google does not like it when keyword-rich anchor text is used a lot.
- This problem also occurs when you Adopt Poor Link Building.
There are link directories all over the internet but many will be considered spam. If you have unnatural links from your site, Google will think you are selling links to third parties.
Simply remove any links on your website which look like paid links or add a no-follow to those links.
Try to go with quality directories such as Yahoo! Directory and don’t forget about local business directories-these can be invaluable to your business.
