Types of Google Ranking Drops and How to Deal with Them
Google ranking drops can be quite annoying phenomena. On the one hand, you may be doing a lot on the SEO front but still, fail to make an impact on Google. On the other hand, the drops may occur at a time when many other issues in your business are going wrong. In such a case, such drops may complicate matters for you. You can detect most of the drops by checking your site at https://serpbook.com. The best approach to use to address drops starts with understanding their nature. Here is a detailed account of some of the most common types of Google ranking drops and the best methods that you can use to address them.
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Drops due to on-page issues
Google constantly checks the integrity and quality of pages by evaluating the kind and number of errors that visitors encounter when they visit the websites. Some of the most common on-page issues include broken links, slow loading speeds and absence of special tags such as those that are used to describe images on sites. If your page has a lot of such errors, it is obvious that Google will compare it to others and then downgrade its ranking. You need to constantly study your analytics to determine whether such issues are the main reason for a drop in your SEO performance. You can track the number of on-page issues to determine whether they are relatively higher than the others and if they are the ones that cause a drop in your performance.
Competitor outranking
At times, your competitor may outrank you because they are doing better than you on many fronts. It is easy to detect such a drop by constantly monitoring your competitors for changes in their rankings. If another site outsmarts you, you will realize that the site suddenly jumps in its ranking while the others remain in their original positions. Such information can be a good starting point for addressing the issues behind the drop. You can craft a good strategy to identify the reasons why your competitor is doing better than you and then implement them by first conducting a detailed study of the site in question.
Google pays close attention to the number and quality of inbound and outbound links on your site. You cannot make good progress by concentrating on increasing the number of outbound links without checking on their quality. The best and most effective strategy is to identify a few high-ranking sites and then ask the owners to link back to yours. Similarly, when providing outbound links, you need to be aware of the fact that it is a better strategy to link internally as well as provide linkages to high-quality sites. Thus, at times, if you lose such links, you may end up experiencing sharp falls in your SEO performance graph over the course of time. If you see such a trend, you need to analyze the performance of your links using any of the tools that have the functionality.
Google Flux
Google flux is a peculiar phenomenon that affects all pages. Typically, if you study your ranking trend, you will notice that the graph has small bumps indicating constant fluctuations in your rankings. The small rises and falls usually represent how the Google rank algorithm automatically works to analyze pages and determine their position relative to others. This method is seldom smooth, and this explains why your ranking always appears to fluctuate, SEL is a good source to know about Google Algorithm updates and Semrush sensor to check daily volatility of SERPs. You can ascribe the small falls to flux by ruling out any other potentially damaging causes such as on-page issues, the kind of links that you have and penalties for using banned SEO practices. Once you are certain that neither of these main issues is affecting your site, you can then zero in on the effect of Google flux on your website to determine the cause of the small falls on your performance graph.
Google penalties
Google normally penalizes sites that do bad things. For example, if you inadvertently use any of the so-called Black Hat SEO mistakes, you may end up losing a few ranking points at the end. Also, at times, if you do some of the practices that the search engine has warned webmasters about, then you may end up falling down the ranking ladder a few rungs. It is up to you to monitor your ranking graph and identify some of the main issues that may have caused a drop in your ranking. A good strategy normally involves monitoring performance for sharp drops and then checking all the other possible causes of drops to rule them out so that you can remain with Google penalty as the only credible explanation of the fall in rank.
In summary, many factors can cause your Google rank to fall over time. Mostly, some of these factors are associated with what is taking place on your websites such as the use of banned practices, lack of enough and high-quality backlinks or the presence of many errors on your site. All these factors are essential and may undermine your performance on some occasions. Thus, while monitoring your rank trend, it is necessary to identify such causes of falls and address them adequately.
