Google ranking dropped drastically what to do ?

Consider this: your rankings have decreased substantially. Maybe they’ve moved up a dozen spots, or maybe they’ve dropped out of the top 100.

Your face has turned pale, and your palms are sweaty. What happens next?

How and in what order do you go about diagnosing the problem? What are the most likely causes of your ranking decline?

Step 1: Don’t freak out!

Don’t be alarmed; this occurs to everyone. This is a component of SEO. Indeed, it is the only thing we can be certain of in SEO.

The good news is that most of the time there is nothing to be concerned about. Perhaps your rank-tracking application is functioning strangely, or Google is fine-tuning its ranking system. Check again the next day, and you’ll probably find that everything has returned to normal.

But what if your rankings do not improve, or if you are simply concerned and want to ensure that everything is in order? Follow the steps in this article to rapidly identify whether your website has SEO issues or if everything is fine and Google just needs some time.

The secret is not to panic if your ranks suddenly tumble. It’s critical to have a checklist in place so that you do the appropriate things for the right reasons and don’t start clicking buttons at random, which could exacerbate the situation. Remember that Google does not care about your website; they only care about their users (and their bottom line). Follow the user, and the ranks will follow.

Step 2: Have your Google rankings declined?

Does your ranks decline, or is your rank tracker acting up?

Check the website and Twitter account of your rank tracker to see if there are any reported issues. Google and the trackers are playing a cat-and-mouse game. Rank trackers frequently need to update their software when Google changes its search engine result pages. Until they can, the rankings they provide to their users may be inaccurate.

Helpful hints

Using a second rank tracking application, set up rank tracking for your most critical keywords. When you doubt the legitimacy of your primary one, you can examine your backup for confirmation.

Use analytics, Google Search Console, and other tools to confirm. Check your website as well. Use Google Search Console(opens in a new tab) to ensure that your Google ranks and organic traffic have not decreased.

Step 3: Assess the impact of the ranking drop.

The search queries and pages affected by a ranking reduction reveal a lot about the underlying problem.

To diagnose the difficulties, use your rank tracking program, site analytics data, Google Search Console data, and Bing Webmaster Tools data to determine the scope of the ranking drop’s impact.

List all search queries that have experienced a decline in ranking and include the following information for each one:

What cluster did the query belong to their previous ranking (to establish a baseline)

• Their new position
• The distinction
• The website that was ranked
• The type of content that was rating
• If the page is indexable
• Any valuable remarks (for example, the date when you made improvements to this)

Step 4: Recent website modifications

Large modifications to a website are frequently the cause of ranking decreases. When you transfer a large number of pages, implement a (responsive) redesign, or revise a large amount of content, you will notice significant swings in your rankings. This is normal, and should only concern you if your rankings do not return to their prior state.

Inquire within your team.

Check with your team and/or agency to determine if any significant modifications were made to the website. Check with your team and/or your agency to determine if anything has recently changed.

Examine your project management software and code repository for any activity that could be related to the decline in ranking.

When we witness a reduction in ranking, the first thing we do is not worry! It could be a penalty, but 9 times out of 10, the problem is straightforward: you or your team broke something. Before you blame an algorithm upgrade, check your change logs.

Examine your SEO tracking software.

If your rankings are critical to your business, it’s a no-brainer to keep an eye on your website’s on-page SEO updates. We differentiate between technical and content changes; technical changes frequently affect the entire website, whilst content changes frequently affect only the pages directly affected.

Technical advancements

Check sure search engines are still scanning and indexing your website in the same way they were previously.

Crawl the website and look for updates in the following areas:

Are your pages still returning HTTP status 200, and redirect still in?

Canonical URL: Have you updated your canonical URLs?

Have search engines suddenly been warned not to index your essential sites because of the Meta robots tag?

Robots.txt: Has your robots.txt been modified? Do search engines still have access to all of your website’s sections that should be indexed?

Are your hreflang definitions still appropriately set up?

Changes to the internal link structure

Changes to the website’s internal link structure can have a significant impact on the SEO performance of your pages, especially if we’re talking about changes to links on the homepage, other authoritative pages, and in the sidebar or footer.

Be aware that when a redesign is implemented, the internal connection structure frequently changes, so keep that in mind.

Changes in content

Because search engines analyze the content to establish relevance for search queries, changes in the content have a significant impact on your rankings. Pages that are deleted have an even greater impact.

Crawl your website and look for changes in the following areas to double-check whether your content has changed.

Title: Even minor changes to the title tag can have a significant influence on your rankings. Were there any modifications?

While the meta description does not directly affect your rankings, it does influence the click-through rate (CTR) for your search result. And the CTR affects your rankings. So keep an eye out for changes in your meta descriptions.

Headings: Search engines understand the importance of headings. Changes to headers may influence your rankings, so check to see if they have been modified.

Body content: Google largely relies on the body content of your page to identify which queries it is relevant for. If you see changes in titles, meta descriptions, or headings, it’s likely that the likely so changed. Title: Even minor changes to the title tag can have a significant influence on your rankings. Were there any modifications?

While the meta description does not directly affect your rankings, it does influence the click-through rate (CTR) for your search result. And the CTR has an effect on you affect to keep an eye out for changes in your meta descriptions.

Headings: Search engines understand the importance of headings. Changes to headers may have an influence on your rankings, so check to see if they have been modified.

Body content: Google largely relies on the body content of your page to identify which queries it is relevant for. If you see changes in titles, meta descriptions, or headings, it’s likely that the body text has also changed. See if you can see the differences.

Step 5: Technical difficulties

If Google has been having technical difficulties crawling and indexing your site, your rankings are extremely likely to suffer as a result.

Anomalies in crawling

Crawl abnormalities are blocking Google from receiving the requested information. If they do not complete this step, they will be unable to index and rank your content:

So, does Google include crawl abnormalities in its Index Coverage report?

And what do your log files reveal? Log files capture low-level information from visitors and search engine crawlers, and may give hints as to what’s causing your Google ranking reduction.

Analyze your log files and focus on the affected URLs you discovered in step 3. Things to keep an eye out for: Google’s crawl activity has lessened. Look for decreased Google crawl activity and an increase in 4xx and 5xx status codes.

When rankings drop, the crawl rate for single pages or entire domains decreases. Analyzing log data is an excellent technique to confirm whether it’s a devaluation or something else. You will also have a better knowledge of when your rankings may have declined and will be able to tie it to updates or changes on your site.

Googlebot blocking

More often than not, ranking drops are caused by a trigger-happy system administrator who opted to ban all traffic from bots or all traffic originating in the United States in the firewall.

Keep in mind that Google does practically all crawl activity from the United States, thus you’d be actively preventing Google from crawling your site, which would quickly result in your pages being deindexed.

Visit your website while using a VPN with a US location. If that works, repeat the process but change your user-agent to Googlebot (see the exact user-agent strings here(opens in a new tab)).

If it succeeds, try checking to see if Google’s IP addresses are blacklisted. There are a few options here:

• Use Google Search Console’s Test live URL (opens in a new tab) option. Fill in a URL there, then click the TEST LIVE URL button in the upper right corner. If that process fails, Google’s IP addresses could be blacklisted. Do you want to go deeper? We go over how to test live URLs in detail here.
• To test, use the Rich Snippet(opens in a new tab) tester to request a URL on your site. If that also fails, you’re onto something — Google might be restricted on an IP level!

Loading time

Have page load times been greatly increased?

• Check your crawl stats in the old Google Search Console (opens in a new tab).
• In Google Analytics, look at the page load time (Behavior > Site Speed > Overview).
• CrUX.run an analysis on it.

Step 6: Google algorithm refresh

Ranking variations are frequently caused by Google upgrades.

Google made 3.200 algorithm adjustments in 2018, according to Search Engine Land(opens in a new tab). We believe that number has only increased since then.

Some changes are minor and barely noticeable, while others are massive and can make or break a firm.

Check to see if your ranking decline corresponds with a Google upgrade. While Google is rarely upfront about minor improvements, SEO specialists around the world keep a close eye on things and have developed methods to detect major changes in ranks and try to link them to updates.

Check Barry Schwartz’s Was There A Google Update? to see if there have been any reports of a Google update (opens in a new tab). Check out the tools below to track ranking fluctuation over time:

• Web Ranking Advancement (opens in a new tab)
• RankRanger(opens in a new tab) (opens in a new tab)
• Algoroo(opens in a new tab) (opens in a new tab)
• AccuRanker(opens in a new tab) (opens in a new tab)

Keep in mind that ranking decreases caused by Google algorithm upgrades may not always occur immediately. Frequently, you’ll notice your rankings progressively sliding away. This makes sense given Google’s need to recalculate and reprocess massive volumes of data.

Google filters like Penguin and Panda can have the same effect, causing ranks to decline over time. It’s crucial to understand that other factors also have a role. One of the first things to do when your rankings are declining is to step back and examine the SERP. Frequently, a ranking decline will be correlated with a more significant change in the appearance of a SERP. If your site hasn’t undergone any significant modifications, Google is changing the structure of the SERPs, and you may need to modify your content to reflect this. Consider promoting video material, providing structured data, or adding map listings.

Step 7: Update Google SERP

Google doesn’t always update its algorithm. They can also alter the layout of their search engine result pages (SERPs) by including new components that either push your snippet to the bottom or draw more attention than your snippet.

Keep in mind that featured snippets are handled differently by rank trackers. Some search engines may not even consider feature snippets when reporting ranks, while others will.

Step 8: Reject beneficial backlinks

Most of the time, you won’t need to disavow spammy backlinks that you don’t want to be affiliated with in order to avoid getting penalized. Unless there is an apparent malicious intent, spamming backlinks doesn’t truly help but also doesn’t hurt (such as for example consistently buying 100,000 blog comments every month).

Be cautious with this because disavowing those bogus backlinks could potentially have a negative effect on your SEO performance.

Step 9: Manual Google Action

People frequently worry that they’ve been penalized by Google when their ranks decline. Most of the time, they haven’t, which is why this part is so far down the article.

Check to see if you might have received a manual action if you’ve run through all the previous tests and still can’t figure out why your rating dropped.

Has Google still indexed your pages?

The most severe type of manual penalty is a complete de-indexing of your website, which often only occurs to websites that are obviously attempting to manipulate Google’s algorithm.

It’s good news if your pages are still listed in the index. If your pages are no longer indexed, you may have received a manual penalty. It can also indicate that you have a significant technical SEO issue with your website, as described in step 5.

Are you still showing up for generic search terms?

If Google penalizes your website, it’s frequently not as harsh as a complete de-indexing. A typical illustration of a less severe penalty is allowing your website to only rank for branded search terms.

See if you can spot any patterns in the search terms for which your website was penalized. Are you still showing up for generic search terms? That’s great news if you are.

Website hacking in step 10

Site hacking, unfortunately, is a very lucrative industry. Hackers frequently infest websites with dangerous code, spammy content, and links once they have gained “access” to them. It’s critical to rule out if you were hacked because this is seriously detrimental to your rankings.

Site hacking, unfortunately, is a very lucrative industry. Hackers frequently infest websites with dangerous code, spammy content, and links once they have gained “access” to them. It’s critical to rule out if you were hacked because this is seriously detrimental to your rankings.

Your website was probably not hacked, but if it was, you should find out as soon as possible so that you may take action to take back control of your website. Google checks webpages for malware and other suspicious behavior. Through Google Search Console, they’ll let you know if they discover that your website has been hacked. Even though this check isn’t foolproof, it only takes ten seconds to check Google Search Console to see whether they are aware of a hack. For that reason, we advise constantly doing so.

Step 11: Modification of search behavior and intent

When Google changes its mind about the purpose of a search, the websites it considers relevant may also change.

Consider the query Birds of Prey, which might relate to both the bird species and the film that struggled with rankings and was renamed “Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)”. The query intent varies over time for many queries, even though we may not be aware of this.

Particularly in odd times like the COVID-19 pandemic. Rankings must have been affected, either directly or indirectly, by the fast change in search activity. While some goods and services are in high demand, others are no longer required.

Step 12: Moving competitors

Your rivals are always moving to catch up with you and lower your listings in the search results as a result.

Even if it’s uncommon for the competition to overtake you for many search queries in a short period, the competition might nonetheless contribute to your ranking decline.

Imagine that a series of 301 redirects were unintentionally deleted following a recent release. 404 – Page Not Found pages are now served by URLs that previously carried a lot of authority, making that authority meaningless. At the same time, your rivals improved and took some of your prominent snippets. Together, these factors have a significant effect and your website’s rankings suffer. Find out whom you lost rankings to by doing an investigation. You created a list of search terms for which your positions declined in step 3; now go deeper to determine who profited from this. Once you’ve done that, try to determine how they were able to defeat you.

Step 13: Backlinks

Use a tool like Ahrefs, Majestic, Monitor Backlinks, or Kerboo to see whether you’ve lost any backlinks. Please be aware that there is always a slight delay before these applications detect lost (or new) links.

In the future, it’s advised that you keep an eye on your backlinks using one of the methods described above so that you may receive notifications when links are lost. After that, you can get in touch with the websites that are linked to see if you can get the backlinks restored.

The level of user interaction with your website is another thing to consider. Your rankings will suffer if visitors quickly leave because they are overloaded with pop-ups or advertisements. The same is true if your material does not answer a user’s search queries. Google will be aware that your response to their search query wasn’t entirely satisfying if they return to the search result page to click another result after not finding what they were looking for.

Such elements are becoming more important in Google’s algorithms. These problems aren’t noted in Google Search Console, yet they affect your rankings. Thus it is of utmost important and significant to check and follow the steps given in the article.