Google Ranking Drop? Here's What You Need To Do
Losing Google Rankings is something that should be avoided whether you're moving your website to another hosting provider or you just launched a new website. The thing with SEO and some SEO companies, though, is that they will often give you guarantees, but there's nothing in place to hold them accountable for it. You can imagine how upsetting this can be when your website has lost its rankings (or hasn't improved) after paying an SEO company lots of money.
So in this article, we'll share some tips with you that may help prevent it from happening to your site or, if you lose rankings, tell you precisely what to do about it. This way, you can have a clearer idea of what steps to take and what issues you might be facing.
Why Did My Website Lose Google Rankings?
Before we look at how to rectify it, let's first understand why your website might have lost rank. There could be several reasons which include:
-
You're In A Keyword ‘Penalty Box'
If you've been doing some things with your site that aren't helping your site's overall theme, such as keyword stuffing or using poor copywriting, then you might be excluded from Google for a while. The reason being that they want to remove spam and low-quality sites which are hurting the overall ranking of all pages in their index.
-
Your Content Is Bad
This is an area where SEO companies often get it wrong. They will often focus on keywords and not the value of the content. If you're using SEO companies to create content for your site, you should always ask for a sample of their work before hiring them. You can see how well it's written and check whether it follows a logical flow or not.
-
The SEO Company Is Doing Something Wrong
Some SEO companies are not as honest as we'd like them to be. They will often promise you the world and deliver nothing. If they do give you results, it's because they've been manipulating Google in some way with keyword stuffing or black hat techniques. This can sometimes lead to a penalty box situation for your website.
-
Your Website Has Been Penalised
This is often something that comes about from using poor-quality SEO companies. You've paid them money, and they've given you no results, then it will be easy for Google to penalize your website because of this due to “unnatural links.”
-
Google Cares Less About Your Website
This is a tough one to swallow. It's true, though, because Google updates its algorithms constantly to give users the best results possible, and sometimes this will be at your expense. If you've been around for a while, though, then it shouldn't affect you that much. It'll just mean that those who have built up trust with Google will be the ones who rank better than you.
How To Know If Your Website Has Lost Rankings?
If your website has dropped in rankings, it's quite likely that you'll notice very quickly. The thing is, though, some SEO companies are doing things behind the scenes that you won't realize and which Google will pick up on, resulting in your website dropping down the rankings.
So how can you tell if this is happening? This is what's known as a “black hat technique” or “SEO spamming.” It means that they're updating your content rather than letting it sit for a while so that it's natural. This is mainly a problem with some SEO companies because they will only do this to your home page and the mega menu on your website, leaving all the other parts untouched for weeks or months at a time.
This makes Google suspicious of you and ends up resulting in penalties which can send your website down several levels. That's why some people see a drop in rankings and then wonder what happened. If your website wasn't actively marketed via PPC or social media, for example, with fresh content being added all the time, then you may have been penalized by Google for doing something black hat.
How To Recover From Losing Search Engine Rankings?
Well, there are five things you can do.
-
Forget About The Rankings
With so many website owners using SEO services these days, if your rankings drop for some reason, then it's not the end of the world. That might be hard to swallow if you're running a business online, but at the end of the day, as long as you're getting a good amount of traffic and sales are going well, there's no reason to worry about your rankings. You should do what makes sense for your business, though, and don't focus on just one element without ensuring that all other elements perform correctly.
-
Take Action Right Away
If you notice that your website has dropped in rankings, don't wait around for a few weeks to see what happens because anything could happen. There is no damage done if you get it sorted out immediately. Contact the SEO company right away and find out why this has happened.
-
Check For Google Penalties
If you contact an SEO company and tell them that your website has dropped in rankings, the first thing they'll ask is if there's a Google penalty present. This will happen automatically because it always does. There is a problem if their SEO company ever tells you that there are no penalties when working on your website.
-
Audit Your Backlink Profile
If you've lost rankings because of something that an SEO company did, then it's likely that you're going to have backlinks from all over the place and not just from one or two sources. Find out what happened with your links and get rid of spammy or low-quality links as soon as possible.
-
Perform A Detailed Analysis
Analyzing your website is important if you want to find out what has gone wrong and what you can do to fix it in the future. The easiest way to do this is by using a tool like Mozbar, Ahrefs, or Majestic SEO to find out which pages are dropping in rankings and what backlinks have gone away.
Understand, Take Action And Get Your Site Back on Google
You may know that your website has lost Google rankings, or you might not, but it's always a good idea to understand the things that could affect them because you can't do anything when something is affecting your website if you don't know what it is. Losing ranks doesn't mean that you should ignore what's going on with your website, but it does mean that you have to take action quickly if there's something wrong.
