Google Rankings Drops 10 Reasons Behind Them and How to Deal with Them

Nothing can be more disheartening than waking up one day to check your analytics report only to encounter a massive drop in your rankings. Imagine disappearing from the top 10 or 50 with all arduous efforts going down the drain. Here in t his blog we will learn Google Rankings Drops 10 Reasons Behind Them and How to Deal with Them

When you notice decreased page views, poor organic traffic, and reduced sessions, you may blame Google for not the drop in your SERP rankings. Unfortunately, many website owners may face these issues and may not know why this is happening to their websites.

Therefore, this guide lets you stay secure by keeping the following reasons in check and learning how to deal with them.

Why Are Your Rankings Dropping on Search Engines?

Numerous reasons stand behind the sudden drop in your website rankings on Google. Sometimes, it is the algorithm update. Other times, you may make wrong modifications to your website. You can go through the following points to understand the reasons and fix them effectively.

1. Rank Drop Due to Google Penalty 

One of the worst things that can happen to you is to get struck by a Google Penalty. You may receive an email saying your website fails to comply with various guidelines, causing you to lose rankings. To see if your website got a penalty, access the Google Search Console and choose “Select your property.” Select the “Search Traffic” option and check “Manual Actions.”

You will be able to check for actions taken by Google. To resolve this problem, you will have to ask Google to reconsider. The page for the manual activity will give you this option. For a successful reconsideration, you must fix the applicable issue and provide evidence to Google.

Do mention the reason behind the issue and be completely honest. The petition will result in a Google employee checking your website to see if it follows Google guidelines.

2. An Algorithm Update by Google 

Rankings commonly fluctuate because of new algorithm updates. Sometimes, the changes can return to normal after the completion of updates. These changes can be permanent at other times and require you to check the reason.

Google will generally announce the upcoming updates. Some updates are not big enough but are connected to specific niches and may impact a handful of websites. After the coverage of these changes, you can find the information regarding how to recover your rankings.

You can also try connecting with the SEO community through social platforms to get a quick response. If core updates affect your rankings, you must check your website’s quality and improve its authority, trust, and relevance.

3. Website Hacking 

You should pray that hacking is not the issue because this not only plummets your website rankings but also jeopardizes your blog’s crucial data. In case of website hacking, Google will display “this site may be hacked” below the website’s domain on the search results.

Using unfamiliar themes or plugins can often be among the many reasons your website gets hacked. Hackers may access your site and add harmful scripts and poor-quality links, negatively impacting your rankings.

However, Google offers a troubleshooter to check for hacked websites and ways to resolve this issue. You can ask the search engine for reconsideration after fixing the errors.

4. Competitor Outranked You 

While this may not be a significant issue for your website, and the ranking drops are not that drastic, your competitor outdoing you does demand some investigations. You can monitor your competitor’s websites and socials to identify this issue. Tracking them and understanding their strategies can help you forecast their subsequent action.

If you notice ranking drops for some keywords, the reason could be on-page optimization. Visit related web pages and see what they are doing differently than you. You can use tools to run website audits to find strategies that work for your competitor.

5. Downtimes 

Poor-quality web hosting faces difficulty staying online and adversely impacts your website rankings. Additionally, if your website is down, but you delay a few days to fix it, Google may consider the website dead.

The result will be a continuous drop in your website rankings until you solve the issue and Google crawlers index your pages again. Similar conditions arise during poor server speed or hacking. Therefore, make sure to check for the problem.

6. Change in Search Intent

Changes in the search intent can cause your snippets to look irrelevant and reduce the organic traffic, resulting in poor rankings. Sometimes, Google answering your intended topics via search results can lower traffic.

You can fix this by determining the search intent and web page’s purpose to ensure it positions for the correct keywords. Also, create enticing snippets to enhance your site’s CTR. The process may take considerable time and experiments to reach desirable results.

Do not forget to compare the snippets with the competitors. You can also optimize your metadata and title, use long-tail keywords, test various snippets, employ schema markup, etc.

7. Low-Quality Unusual Hyperlinks

Poor-quality unusual links on your site suggest inadequate practices and reduce trustworthiness. When your site suddenly has several of these links, your website’s authority will suffer and cause ranking drops.

To fix this, monitor your site’s backlink profile via specific tools to determine low-quality links. To remove these links, you can email the site owner to discard links or ask Google to remove them using the Disavow tool.

8. Recent Website Modifications

Modifying your website is a sure invitation to messing up your rankings. A slight mistake can have a far-reaching impact on your SEO and drop your position. Changes to your theme, permalink, code, etc., can result in unfamiliar issues. These conditions occur during website rebranding when you delete a page, upgrade links, change the URL, etc. So the best you can do is improve the performance and SEO of your website

To avoid this, you must create a backup before rebranding and replace the latest changes. Moreover, you should alter the staging environment and run thorough tests before making the website live.

9. Robots.txt File Issues 

Robots.txt file compiles rules and instructions for search engine crawlers and spiders on the way to crawl website pages. While you must always avoid modifying this file, sometimes you or a plugin may alter it and impact how Google bots crawl.

Upon disallowing the consent, the bots fail to index the pages, which may lead to ranking drops. Visit “www.yoursite.com/robots.txt” to study the file and check for disallowed Google bots.

10. Loss of Backlinks

Sometimes, building backlinks is not the only way to boost your SERP rankings. You also need to maintain all the backlinks you have established in the past. Losing authoritative backlinks can significantly lower site authority and cause Google to drop your ranking.

You can use tools like SEMRush to check for absent backlinks. Ensure to analyze the reason behind the backlink’s disposal and ask the website owner to add it again. You may otherwise obtain a higher authority link from another website.

Conclusion 

Nothing is as painful as watching a drastic drop in your Google rankings. All your hard work can amount to nothing when this happens. Nonetheless, it is nearly possible to deal with every reason behind your reduced position. Now, you must know how to fix various issues and regain your ranking through this guide.