|
Top 6 reasons why your search engine rankings
have dropped
Have your rankings dropped recently? Before you do anything,
you should try to find out what has caused your ranking drop.
 |
The better you understand the reason why your rankings
dropped, the better you can prevent your website from
future ranking drops. There are six major reasons for
ranking drops: |
1. Your website changes
Most webmasters update their web pages regularly. As long
as the changes are only small, this won't have a big effect
on your rankings. However, if you re-design your web pages
or if you optimize a page for a new search term then search
engines might re-calculate your search engine rankings.
Google even has a filter for changed web pages. If you
change your web pages, Google will temporarily apply a
filter to your sites. Details
can be found here.
Required action: If you have web pages with high
search engine rankings then you should change these pages
with great care.
2. The links to your website change
If you have an old website with a grown inbound link structure
then it's not likely that your site rankings will drop
because of a link change.
If the links to your site are mainly paid links that suddenly
disappear or get discounted by Google then the loss of
these links can be enough to cause a significant ranking
drop.
In addition, sudden changes in the linking structure of
a website make your website suspicious.
Required action: If you heavily rely on paid
links you might want to reconsider your linking strategy. Try
to get inbound links that last.
Continually getting links is essential to keep high rankings.
If you don't work on your links then your website will
be replaced by better linked web pages in the search results.
3. The websites of your competitors change
Everybody wants to be on Google's first result page. For
that reason, it's only natural that other websites will
be listed better than yours if you don't react.
Many websites target the same keywords as you do. If these
other websites have better content and better links than
your site then it's only natural that these sites get better
rankings.
Required action: You must offer better content
than your competitors. Make sure that you offer many web
pages that are relevant
to your search terms and that you have better
inbound links than your competitors.
4. Spam elements on your web pages
Search engines don't like spam. If search engines find
out that you use cloaking, hidden text, doorway pages or
any other spam technique on your web pages then it is extremely
likely that your website will be penalized.
Required action: Remove all spam elements from
your web pages. Just because your website hasn't been penalized
yet doesn't mean that search engines won't find the spam
elements in the near future.
5. Search engine algorithm changes
Search engines are continually improving their ranking
algorithms. While most changes are rather subtle, some
ranking algorithm changes can have a major impact on the
rankings of your web pages.
Required action: Wait for some days to find out
if the ranking drop is not just temporarily. Then optimize
your web pages so that they reflect the
latest search engine algorithms.
6. Technical problems
Your web server can be the reason for a ranking drop.
If your website is down when the search engine spider tries
to access your website then search engines cannot give
your web pages high rankings because they don't know your
pages.
Some websites display the correct web page in the web
browser but the server returns an error code. In that case,
search engines won't index the web pages.
Required action: Make sure that your website
is hosted on a reliable server that has no downtime. Check the
HTTP status code that your website returns.
Almost any website owner will see a significant ranking
drop sooner or later. Don't panic if this happens to you.
Try to find the reason for the ranking drop and then act
accordingly.
|
