A drop in your site ranking on Google has always been an alarming situation. Although, fluctuations in site ranking are real, watching your site ranking going down is never good news. Checking your rankings and watching them entirely disappeared is a terrible thing. Admittedly, it’s not the end of a site.
You must be ready, able to fix the issues, and reestablish from anything that caused the drop. Your first step should evaluate the situation and determine what factors have dropped the ranking of your website on Google.
So here are the 10 possible reasons to explain your website’s sudden drop in site ranking on Google.com.sg.
1. Updated Algorithms
Google has thousands of programmers for updating the Algorithms. Both minor and major updates in the algorithm of Google can shift the ranking of websites. This could a big or slight drop in the ranking, and it depends on the update.
These updates ensure a prime experience to the users by providing the relevant searches. The drop in the ranking of your site by Updated Algorithms is an indication that you need to conform to updates.
A hit by Google updates can be avoided by being organic and create a brand. User experience must also be optimized in that case. Look for the significant shakeups or spikes in the results of the keywords. Keep observing the SERP Changes for the niche keywords.
READ: The History of Google Algorithms
2. Tracking the Wrong Rankings
Outdated or irrelevant keywords must be updated now. Few keywords are not providing the best results because these days, searching methods have been changed. Natural search, which is a complete
sentence search, shows the perfect results, and these sentences are helping in the ranking of the site.
Keyword phrases and keywords matter a lot. The keyword strategy should be updated because searches have been shifted towards being specific and natural.
READ: Keywords vs Longtail Keywords, What’s the Difference?
3. Manual Actions /Penalties
This action can drop your website ranking more than 10 to 20 points. These penalties are applied manually by the employees of Google. If the drop of your site on Google is swift and harsh and your site is ranked up in other search engines like Bing and Yahoo, this indicates a penalty by Google.
First of all, check the Google Webmaster Tool account. Google will send you notification about all the manual actions against you. Examine the cause that has triggered the penalty. It could be on-page or off-page.
If you are creating good content and not participating in the linking schemes, on-page violation is not an issue. For on-page violation, check your linking and content.
Keep monitoring your link profile to avoid off-page violations. A sudden inflow of toxic backlinks might be an issue. If it is off-page, find and remove the unnatural links.
4. Competitors
This is just a slight drop in the ranking of your site. The site of your competitor just outranked just your site, and there is no drop in the ranking of other websites.
Keep analyzing the site and social profiles of your competitors to understand them. As your competitors are trying to improve the rank of your site, your website will never be fully optimized.
Look at the In link rank, on-page optimization, and social signals of your competitors. Also, check all the number of sites that are linking to the domain. Audit the site of your competitor to understand the tactics and techniques they use.
Successful SEO Audit: How to Do it, a Step by Step Guide
5. Low-Quality Backlinks
Using outdated or spammy link building techniques can drop the ranking of a site. The low-quality backlink is used to rank the website by manipulating the algorithms of Google. This is a risky task, and Google can penalize your site by de-indexing it from the search engine.
Harmful quality guest posts, bad quality web directories, and spam comments are the example of low quality backlinks. These tactics are often known as black hat SEO tactics. You must put your all efforts to clean up all those low-quality backlinks.
6. Losing Links
Losing some of your good quality backlinks can also outrank your site. Losing a lot of links from the link profile can cause huge spikes in the link velocity. Majestic or Ahrefs can assist you in checking the lost links. You can also check the inbound links to your site.
Check all of your lost links individually. Google may have removed those links intentionally, considering them unnatural links. You can monitor all of your relationships by using link monitoring software.
READ: What is Link Building and How to do it right?
7. Check SEO Basics
Basic SEO elements have a significant role in ranking your site. Check that your rankings are not held back by basics such as meta descriptions, title tags, and headings. The title tag tells Google about all the content of your website.
A small change in the title tag can impact the ranking. Through Google Analytics, you can compare the traffic on your page by using different title tags. Always keep those Meta tags and titles, which are generating more traffic to your site.
8. Copied Content
Original and high-quality content can surely rank your website, but if the content on your site is copied and low value, this can drop the ranking. Bad content is the thing that any user won’t like, and they will not stay on your site.
Online tools can help you to check the uniqueness of your content. You can edit or rewrite the entire content, and after updating the new content, Google Analytics will help you in comparing the results of new content to old content.
9. The Google Dance
Fluctuating in rankings is common from device to device, from day to day, from place to place, and based on the host of many other variables. Google may vary the results according to the searches and interests of a user.
Google dance is responsible for the small changes in the ranking of a site. Google is always crawling and updating the selected pages, so the search result keeps varying slightly over the course of a month. Ranking results can change wildly during the Google Dance.
10. Bad Redirects
If you are changing the site structure or moving to a new server, always setup 301 redirects, both the old and new domains will be properly linked up by this method. If some page of your site is top ranked on Google but if it redirects all of the traffic to some other page, this could seriously cause a drop in your ranking as all of viewers are visiting your site for that specific page and this is called bad redirect.
Before adding some permanent new redirect to your site, you should test it, and after testing, you should use that redirect.
