Imagine one day you wake up only to find out your website’s hard-earned rankings changed completely. It has disappeared from the Google’s top and now it is untraceable. For sure, this is the most disappointing feeling one can experience especially after investing a lot of money in the success of your business.
But a dropin site ranking on Google shouldn’t come as a surprise and you need to admit it’s likely to happen one day. That’s why you should understand how to handle such issues. Below are some reasons why Google rankings can suddenly drop and how you can fix them.
Off-Page Negative SEO
Negative SEO is aimed at decreasing a competitor’s site rankings in SERPs. These activities typically include unnatural links to the site, content scraping and even hacking the site. Though successful negative SEO attacks are rare, they may cause a big ranking drop across a substantial number of keywords if they occur.
Your site may also be hurt by backlinks that come from spammy sources. This can either be a result of buying low-quality backlinks or may be competitors might be attacking your website. After all, Google bots will be unable to crawl certain pages. Regardless, be sure to use SEO Spy Glass to generate your backlink profile.
Manual Search Engine Penalty
Manual actions can possibly be imposed by human reviewers on Google when they determine pages on your site are not complaint with Google’s webmaster quality guidelines. There are several reasons for manual Google penalties and the most common is when your site has been hacked. No wonder carefully analyzing your website should be your top-most priority.
When you suddenly notice a big drop in your rankings for a substantial number of keywords, the first action should be to check the manual penalties since they’re easy to find. If your account has indeed received a manual penalty, there will be a notice in the account which states the action was manual and also specify the reason for it. Luckily, there are numerous Google rank tactics you can leverage to prevent this.
The Bottom Line
You don’t have to go overboard merely because you want to improve the ranking of your website on Google. Be sure to remove poor security features, have better quality content and prioritize better keyword research. Fortunately, you can always get more insights on Google ranking drop here without the hassle.
