Contents
Reclaim Your Google Rankings
No matter how frequently you update your website, sooner or later you will come across small changes in its performance, and rarely, an abrupt and sharp decline in Google rankings.
Your website used to rank on the first page for your money keywords for months without any problems, but one morning you check the stats and it falls behind or disappears from the first page of search results for no apparent reason, now that’s concerning.
More than concerning, this can be a dreadful situation. You are right to fear the worst, meaning less and less organic traffic and conversions, if you can’t restore your rankings and recover your lost traffic.
Here is a screenshot of traffic recovered within only a week after technical fixes took place.
Don’t worry, there is a plan laid out in this post. Read carefully below.
Why Rankings Drop
Understanding the problem: SEO is a sophisticated, always-shifting environment. You’re working hard to check every guideline, plus you strive to produce as much content as rival websites do daily. But why after doing so much work you see your rankings dropping? Following are the few reasons:
- Search Algorithm Updates: Search engines like Google frequently update their ranking algorithms to improve the quality and relevancy of search results.
- Continual Competition: SEO competition is never-ending because excellent content is being created and optimized by your rivals, who may seize higher marketing ranks if they perform better than you do.
- Keyword popularity and hence search engine ranks may all change with trends, seasonality, and variations in user behavior.
- Website Changes: The changes such as changing the images, backlinks, adding new content, changing the structure may cause such changes in rank and the results in search engines. Small changes bring about temporary fluctuations.
- Technical Issues: Usual causes for rank-leaves are usually attributed to redundant codes, broken links, unresponsive sites, long download, and unfriendliness with mobile devices.
- Location-based Reasons: Search engines take the location of the user into account regarding what reflects on its search results, so that with the same keywords, different locations may give different rankings, which may cause a drop in rankings.
Verify the Drop
Keep in mind there are always ways to recover rankings. You shouldn’t jump to conclusions about the health of your rankings with just about every single shift. There are always small changes or fluctuations in your rankings with the rate search algorithms change. The same stands for a small +/- one-position shift that may drop a keyword from the first page e.g. 10 to 11, and that’s excepted and normal.
Do not panic just yet but keep on monitoring. Your page should recover the initial position in a few days.
But if there’s a big decrease, like five or more spots, you need to act quickly.
Use SEO tools that track keyword performance over time to track with accuracy your rankings.
When you have the whole picture, you can go ahead and investigate the drop.
Webmaster Guidelines
The best ways to assist Google in indexing, and ranking your website are outlined in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Violating these rules may have a detrimental effect on how Google ranks your website or even result in its removal.
Three primary areas are covered by Google’s guidelines: quality, technical, and content and design.
- Quality recommendations on how to avoid manipulative techniques, also referred to as black-hat SEO approaches, like copying content from other websites, stuffing keywords into content, or using clever redirects.
- Content and UX Recommendations for creating a user-friendly website with a strong information architecture.
- Technical Guidelines to encourage search engines to crawl and index your website.
To check for any crawl mistakes, manual actions, or security flaws that can prevent Google from indexing your website, you can utilize Google Search Console. It’s buggy but in the long run, it yields positive results.
By following Google’s guidelines when developing your website’s SEO strategy, you’re practicing the so-called “white-hat SEO” and ensuring that there won’t be any unwanted ranking drops down the line.
Algorithm Updates
It is well known that Google often updates its search algorithm to caliber its search results. These upgrades can be subtle adjustments that are hardly noticeable or major overhauls that result in abrupt changes to search engine rankings on millions of websites.
The most recent one to date is the November 2023 Core Update.
To stay informed about these important changes:
- Follow search engine optimization news sources such as Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Journal, and this blog to stay current. These resources typically include up-to-date information on changes to the Google algorithm as well as professional analysis and suggestions for modifying your SEO approach.
- Google frequently posts important updates on its blog or Twitter accounts, so be sure to follow Google’s official news. Thus, be sure to follow prominent Google Search Relation team members like Danny Sullivan and John Mueller as well as the Google Search Central Blog daily. Note that these guys push the envelope, so they will christen any wrong as good.
- Track Google’s search results and algorithm modifications with Algorithm Monitoring Tools, then interpret them following your KPIs, and metrics that make sense for your business. Changes in Google’s rankings are more significant the “hotter” and “stormier” the forecast.
Backlinks Audit
Here’s how to verify and manage lost backlinks:
- Employ tools for backlink analysis. Several SEO tools have backlink-tracking features. Ahrefs is among the prominent instances but sometimes skews the numbers. This tool could be useful for tracking websites that link to you, keeping an eye on your backlink profile, and—most importantly—any backlinks that you may have lately lost.
- Use SEO tools to find Lost Backlinks: These tools can do routine checks to find lost backlinks. There are a few possible causes of lost backlinks: the website may have gone offline, the linked page may have been taken down, or the connection may have been removed.
- Examining Lost Backlinks is key. After you’ve located the missing backlinks it’s time to examine the relevance and quality of your referring domains. Losing these links may have contributed to your rankings decline if they were of a high caliber.
A solid SEO plan should not only aim to obtain backlinks, but it should also make sure those connections are relevant, of a high caliber, and most importantly, permanent. As a result, regularly checking the quality of your backlinks can be an important component of any SEO recovery strategy.
You should disavow links that come from malicious websites, such as those that have been hacked, include malware, or are pornographic. Or you can disavow links that originate from unrelated or low-quality websites.
When negative SEO was a thing, disavowing links was used to help. However, Google can now degrade links thanks to its algorithm, a sort of disavow algorithm.
Replace Lost Backlinks
The first moves you will need to make after freeing those keyword ranks will be concerned with the lost backlinks, especially if they were of great worth.
- Reach Out to Website Owners: Pride comes ahead when a site owner finds a wanted URL deleted on purpose or mistakenly. From this point, you ask them whether it would help to fall on the old link. It helps to mention what kind of benefits would accrue to both of you, such as increased site visitation, user-friendly content, and more enjoyable user experiences.
- Replace Pages and Links that are Broken: Your page or link might have actually been linked to/backed with several websites. You may have even lost some backlinks. Correct broken links or set up a new 301 redirect from old URL pages to the new location.
- Produce High-Quality Content: If the site has closed or you were denied the reinstatement of backlinks, the next best thing is to acquire new, high-quality backlinks. The foundation of high-quality backlinks is to produce original, creative, and innovative content that people want to link to.
- Guest posting: An excellent method to generate targeted high-quality backlinks from reputed sites within the industry.
- Keep an eye on your backlink profile will enable you to notice any changes really quickly. Both old and new backlinks will be monitored regularly. This guarantees that in the future, you can react fast to missing or misplaced backlinks.
Website Audit
A website audit part of an exhaustive study of all parameters that could influence the search engine visibility of your website. Through this thorough analysis, you can arrive at an impeccable SEO plan after putting forth some effort in learning about the website, some particular web pages, and general traffic.
- Find any technical issues because they might affect your website ranking negatively. Example issues may include sitemap errors, errors with your robots.txt files, and slow website loads. Some particularly useful tools are SEMrush Site Audit tool and Google’s Search Console.
- Check the quality and relevance of the content, ensuring it is exciting, relevant, and original to your audience. Thin or duplicated content could absolutely harm your rankings. There are various copywriting tools that may be used to check for any duplicate content on your website.
- Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly as Google uses mobile-first indexing, which gives precedence to the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking. Hence, being mobile friendly is primarily necessary for the website. The free Mobile-Friendly Test tool may help in this regard (Google was said to have sunset it last December; it appears to be another one of Google’s gimmicks, now replaced by the Lighthouse report).
- Analyze the page and URL structure; they should contain keywords relevant to the page’s content, description, and SEO. Every page should have its URL. Furthermore, make sure that the hierarchy of your website makes sense to both search engines and visitors.
- Check all metadata. Make sure that all titles, meta descriptions, and alt text contain the intended keywords. They ought to appropriately sum up the information on the page.
- Evaluate your site’s navigation because easily navigable websites not only increase user experience but also search engine optimization. A high bounce rate can be caused by faulty or complicated navigation, which will hurt your rankings.
Clean Up Your Content
High-quality, relevant, and captivating content draws visitors, extends their stay on your website, and motivates other websites to reciprocate links.
- Update Any Outdated Content. Things change more quickly than you might expect, so information that was true three years ago might not be applicable now. Periodically review and change out-of-date materials. You can completely revise posts, append additional materials, or refresh data and stats.
- Purge “Thin” content or pages devoid of quotable high-value content as because they will hurt rankings. Improve such pages with better contents or consider merging them into relevant topics where appropriate.
- Boost content quality. Search engines reward the worth of information that is interesting and of high quality. Your text should be well-written as well as the subject matter. It should be read by people who will.
- Update and Add Internal Links. Refreshing your content brings yet another benefit of redefining your internal linking. So put in place all your content, enabling links to other pages relevant to your website.
Cleaning your content can not only add value to your existing pages but may also be a delightful exercise for the readership.
Content is the backbone of any website, and its upkeep is nothing less than acting as a life force for achieving success.
Manual Penalties
In checking for manual penalties, the verification as to whether a human reviewer has penalised your website is part of the task. When Google detects a website that does not follow its quality guidelines, a reviewer will hand out a manual penalty to the site if it really violates Google’s guidelines.
This is how to look for and cope with these penalties:
- Use Google Search Console to check. In the left-hand menu under “Security & Manual Actions,” click the “Manual Actions” button. This is where you will learn what manual actions, if any, Google has levied against your site, and why; this last bit of information is rarely helpful.
- Understand which type of penalty has been imposed. The manual action report gives a description of the penalty under which an action was taken. Examples are “Unnatural links to your site” and “Thin content with little or no added value.” The report will often give examples or cite specific pages where your site was accused of a breach.
- Apply Remedial Measures There should be a course for action once the type of penalty is known. If it relates to unnatural links, you would likely be required to remove them or disavow them. If it is thin, then it needs some work with a focus on quality and originality.
- Resubmit Your Site. From there, you’re eligible to resubmit your site for reconsideration once the issues that led to the manual penalty have been addressed. In this case, you will provide a detailed explanation of measures carried out in remedying the violations. After your site is revised, Google decides whether to lift the penalty based on the changes you made.
Just because your rankings went down, that does not necessarily mean your site has been slapped with a manual penalty. Only when all other scenarios have been ruled out or when Google issues a direct notice should you consider this possibility. Although quite rare, punishment does occur with severe consequences, so if you received one, you must act quickly.
Image by rawpixel.com on Freepik