Has Your Google Ranking Dropped Dramatically? How To Fix it?

Consider this: your google ranking dropped dramatically. Maybe by a dozen spots—or maybe they’ve plummeted out of the top 100.

Your face has turned pale, and you have sweating hands. What happens now?

How do you go about identifying the problem, and in what order?

What are the most likely reasons for your Google ranking dropped dramatically?

Take a big breath and don’t overthink these questions.

Don’t worry; this occurs to all of us. It is part of SEO. Indeed, the one certainty in SEO is a reduction in Google ranks.

The good news is that there’s usually nothing to worry about. Your rank-tracking application may be acting up, or Google is fine-tuning its ranking algorithm. 

But what if your rankings don’t recover, or you’re simply concerned and want to ensure everything is in order?

Go through the procedures below to quickly evaluate whether your website has SEO issues or whether everything is fine and Google just needs some time.

Fix DROPPED Google Rankings

A significant Google ranking drop dramatically in your Google results can be caused by several things, including increasing competition, a human action by Google, an algorithm change, or even an incorrect character in your robots.txt file.

1. Google Algorithm Changes

The first reason your Google ranking dropped dramatically is a change in Google’s algorithm. I purposefully left this as the last choice for a couple of reasons:

• People prefer to think that ranking shifts are caused by an algorithm update, and this perception might dissuade them from investigating the concerns outlined above.
• It is sometimes difficult to establish that your ranking changes are the consequence of an algorithm change because Google produces hundreds of modifications every year and seldom recognizes when a change is introduced.
• It is generally difficult, if not impossible, to recoup ranking losses caused by an algorithm update because Google rarely specifies what an algorithm changes targets.
• The default advice is to “make sure you’re adhering to our webmaster quality guidelines.”
• Sometimes the advice is, “There is nothing in particular to fix.”

You won’t know for certain if your Google ranking dropped dramatically is the consequence of an algorithm update until Google explicitly states:

1) that the algorithm changed

2) what was targeted in that adjustment? Most of the time, that information is kept private.

2. The Keyword Has Volatile Search Results

Search engine results pages for some searches, particularly evergreen inquiries, remain rather stagnant. However, with other inquiries, the SERPs vary regularly. This might be caused by a lot of things, but here are a handful of the most common:

• Google is not confident about the query’s search aim. Google’s objective is to give searchers the exact information they’re searching for, but it’s not always clear what that purpose is. In this situation, it may sort results often to precisely detect searcher intent and the results that best match that purpose.
• The question necessitates rapid responses. News inquiries are an obvious example of Google prioritizing timely results, but this might also apply to “the best shows on Netflix,” where something posted three months ago no longer contains anything fresh and popular that has just been launched.

If you feel you’re dealing with a dynamic SERP, consider checking your ranks for keywords. 

There are several approaches to dealing with fluctuating search results. You might optimize your content for a more evergreen term, or you could re-optimize for a keyword with specific search intent. If you’re targeting a term that requires up-to-date material, you may simply update your article regularly to ensure that it’s constantly fresh.

3. Someone Published Content Better Than Yours

Rankings for individual sites may have declined as a result of competing material that Google deems superior to your own. Competing material might include:

• Be greater quality.
• Be more comprehensive.
• Have more backlinks.
• To improve search results, consider updating content, satisfying searcher intent, including relevant assets (e.g. videos), and optimizing for search.

If you suspect this is the source of your Google ranking dropped dramatically, you should analyze the results that are currently outranking your own.

What is unique about those results?

What is better about them?

Do they have further links?

4. You Lost Some of Backlinks?

Links are one of Google’s top three ranking criteria, so losing some of your backlinks—especially high-authority backlinks—can cause your page to plummet in SERP results.

A service like Marketing Lad may help you remain on top of changes to your backlink profile.

Marketing Lad notifies you when you win or lose a backlink, making it simple to contact sites and figure out why they’re no longer referring to your website. Sometimes a site deletes your link by mistake, and just asking for it to be restored will get you that link back.

5. Your User Experience Has Diminished

Google has clearly warned that some user experience concerns may affect your results, including website load times, mobile friendliness, and invasive interstitials.

If you recently updated the content or appearance of your page, it’s conceivable that it now loads slower or isn’t mobile-friendly.

You may use Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool to examine the load speed of your website (target a score of 90-100) and the “Mobile Usability” report in Google Search Console can help you identify mobile-friendliness issues. If you have mobile-friendliness issues that need to be addressed, Google will offer a description of them in Google Search Console.

6. Site Migration, Refresh, or Redesign Without Redirects

If you recently relocated your site to a new domain, updated some of its pages, or redesigned it, the modifications may have needed to be completed.

For example, if you modify any of your site’s URLs along the road, your google rankings drop dramatically might be the consequence of failing to install redirects—or implementing redirects incorrectly.

When you modify a page’s URL, Google treats it as a new page. Any equity acquired by the page from Google over time and any backlinks pointing to it are lost. You begin from zero. As a result, the ideal strategy is never to update your URLs.

Of course, this is not always possible, so if you need to update your URLs, you may avoid these effects while maintaining your rankings by 301 redirecting existing sites to their new URLs.

7. Someone Mistakenly Tagged Your Page(s) as No-index

Sometimes developers accidentally leave a noindex robots meta tag on site pages. This frequently occurs when migrating modified pages from a development or staging environment to production. However, if you use WordPress and a plugin like Yoast SEO, authors and editors may accidentally include this tag.

The noindex robots meta tag instructs Google not to index that page; hence, if Google discovers this tag on any of your site’s pages, that page is removed from its index.

You may view the code of a page by opening it in your browser, right-clicking, and selecting “View Page Source.” Then, to launch the find function, press Control + F (Windows) or Command + F (Mac) and type “noindex.”

Final Thoughts

Rankings decline; this is a fact in the realm of SEO. Just keep your calm and thoroughly explore what caused your google ranking to drop dramatically.

Aside from having a mechanism in place to investigate the likely cause of the dip, it is strongly advised that you have monitoring that records changes to your website’s content and technological base. After all, without such information, you are in the dark.

If you’ve read this post, it’s clear that your website’s SEO is extremely essential to you.

Why not let Marketing Lad monitor your website?

FAQs

1. Why did my organic traffic suddenly drop and why do I have fewer visitors?

A significant decline in organic traffic might be due to a variety of things, such as algorithm modifications, technological difficulties, or changes in user behavior. Conducting a detailed review of your website’s performance, tracking search engine upgrades, and identifying potential concerns can all help you discover and fix the underlying reason for the fall.

2. Why did my website disappear from Google?

A website’s disappearance from Google search results might be due to a variety of factors, including human punishments, technical issues such as indexing or server faults, or algorithmic changes. Conducting a thorough audit to detect and resolve any errors, as well as following Google’s standards, will assist restore exposure.

3. Why does my Google rank keep changing so much?

Google rank variations are caused by a variety of reasons, including algorithm upgrades, shifts in rivals’ strategy, and user behavior. These changes are expected as Google refines its ranking criteria. Monitoring performance data, remaining informed about upgrades, and modifying techniques as needed can all assist in lessening the impact of these changes.