{"id":10245,"date":"2023-01-19T15:45:04","date_gmt":"2023-01-19T12:45:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magecloud.agency\/?p=10245"},"modified":"2024-04-04T14:37:32","modified_gmt":"2024-04-04T11:37:32","slug":"recovery-from-google-ranking-drop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magecloud.agency\/recovery-from-google-ranking-drop\/","title":{"rendered":"SEO Case: How to Recover from Google Ranking Drop"},"content":{"rendered":"
Have you ever experienced a sudden drop in your website’s Google ranking?<\/p>\n
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It can be one of the most disheartening experiences for any webmaster or a business owner. You may be wondering what caused the sudden decline in rankings, and more importantly, how you can recover quickly.<\/p>\n
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Don’t worry, you’re not alone – this is a common problem faced by many website owners. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to quickly recover from a Google ranking drop. In this guide, we will provide you with an easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide on how to recover quickly from a Google ranking drop.<\/p>\n
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You’ll learn about the various causes of ranking drops, what you can do to identify the source of the problem, and effective strategies for quickly restoring your rankings. So if you’re looking to recover quickly from a Google ranking drop, this guide is for you.<\/p>\n
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Table of contents:<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Ranking loss: what should you do? [SEO Case Study]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Causes of Google Ranking Drops<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Strategies for Preventing Google Ranking Drop<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Imagine this: you look at your ranking report and see your hard-earned rankings suddenly drop dramatically. Maybe by a dozen positions\u2014or maybe they’ve dropped outside the top 100.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It’s not the best feeling in the world. What now?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n How do you go about diagnosing what the issue is, and in what order? What are the most likely reasons for your rankings to have dropped?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n No messing things up! This happens. This is a part of SEO.\u00a0 Just be ready to recover from whatever caused the ranking drop like a superhero.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you notice your rankings fall, wait a few days for them to bounce back.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A dramatic drop in your Google rankings can be caused by a variety of factors, including increased competition, a manual action from Google, an algorithm update, or even an accidental character in your robots.txt file.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Since Google’s tuning their ranking algorithm regularly, your site can be affected anytime. So, check again the next day, and often you’ll see that things have gone back to normal.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When you work with companies, it\u2019s not always easy to keep track of what\u2019s going on behind the scenes. First, check with your team and\/or agency to see if there were any high-impact changes made to the website:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You\u2019ll need to ask these questions to both internal and external teams to gain true insight into\u00a0what<\/em> changes may have caused rankings from Google to disappear. Ask teams about any minor or major changes that have been made in the past few weeks to find things to check on to see if they\u2019re impacting rankings.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you\u2019re the one managing content, servers, and optimization, it\u2019s easy to correlate changes you\u2019ve made with lost rankings.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If so, go through the steps listed in this guide to quickly determine whether your website is suffering from SEO issues, or all is good and Google only needs a bit of time.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Cause, when your ranking drop lasts for a few days, you must take a strategic approach to solve this issue.<\/p>\n Even if the situation is very bad, don’t let that upset you too much. The most important step is to determine the reasons why the SEO setup crashed.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Perform an SEO audit to correct the mistakes found. The weak spots that can lead to the ranking deterioration are:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Of course, this is not a full list of\u00a0ranking loss causes. Nevertheless, you can start with it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n A drop in Google rank can be a legitimate cause for concern, but it may not be what you think.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Before taking drastic measures to find out why your Google ranking dropped dramatically and fixing the Google rankings drop problem, it is important to confirm if your Google rankings dropped overnight.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n How do you do that?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you see a steep reduction in traffic, the problem is real and you should do something about it to prevent further traffic loss.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Here’s a screenshot from Google Search Console’s performance screen of one of our clients that\u00a0shows performance that goes down:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Do all signs still point to a Google ranking drop? There is a reason for that definitely!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Google ranking drops are often caused by different technical changes to a website. When you’ve migrated a bunch of pages, rolled out a (responsive) redesign, or reworked a lot of content you’ll see big fluctuations in your rankings.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you experience a sudden drop in your Google rankings, the first thing you should do is try to identify the source of the problem. If the drop was caused by one of the issues mentioned below, you should be able to identify it quickly. If not, you’ll need to conduct a thorough analysis of your website’s SEO health.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Guide, based on the example of our client’s case:<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Step 1.<\/strong><\/p>\n In Google Search Console (NOTE: All requests to the Google Search Console API must be authorized by an authenticated user),\u00a0 quickly check keywords\/pages with traffic drop in comparison with the previous period and identify sections that took a hit by heading over to:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n In our case, we’ve noticed an almost double drop in total clicks and impressions.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Step 2. <\/strong><\/p>\n Export data to Sheets and add any comments that may be useful (for instance, any changes made to this page). Often just doing this, lays out a pattern. It could be that the ranking drop only impacted specific sections of your website. Finally, analyse the whole picture and try to discover the presence of correlation dependencies in the data.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Doing that in our client’s case, we find out that most of the pages that dropped were product pages.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Step 3. <\/strong><\/p>\n Choose a few pages from the list and check whether they are indexable. To do this:<\/p>\n Go to Google search and browse <\/p>\n Step 4. <\/strong><\/p>\n If the page is indexed, then check how Google cashed this page. In our case, we found out the product page content cashed by Google was not Product Details Tab content, but info from the Delivery & Returns Tab. As we realized later, the new tab was added by the client using a specific Magento extension and its content started to be indexed by Google by default.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As soon as we fixed the issue and made the Product Details Tab to be active by default, the traffic volume has gone back\u00a0to the previous value.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Before you rush into recovering your rankings, it’s important to understand the possible causes of a Google ranking drop. A dramatic Google ranking drop can be caused by many factors, such as for instance content changes, an algorithm update, technical SEO issues<\/a>,<\/span> improvements competitors made, SERP layout changes and a Google penalty. Some of them might be easy to identify and fix, while others might require assistance from a technical SEO specialist.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Let’s dig into common causes of ranking drops:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you see a sharp drop in your Google SEO ranking (more than 10 positions), Google manual penalties are the first thing to check for. Manual actions are imposed by human reviewers at Google when they determine that your website pages are not compliant with Google\u2019s webmaster quality guidelines<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Some of the common causes of Google penalties are: your site contains user-generated spam, your site has been hacked, unnatural backlinks, thin content, and cloaking.\u00a0You can find out more about each type of manual action<\/a>\u00a0and how to deal with it as explained by Google.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What’s the fix?<\/strong><\/p>\n Log in to your Google Search Console\u00a0account and go to the\u00a0Security and Manual Actions\u00a0> Manual Actions\u00a0<\/em>section. If the site has indeed received a manual penalty, there will be a notice in the account.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Google won’t be too specific, but they’ll give you a solid idea of where to look for the culprit. Identifying exactly what harmed your site is the first thing you have to do to fix it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you have no idea what caused the Google penalty, check below these most popular violations and SEO tips for each.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Google makes regular major and minor changes in its search ranking algorithm. The updates help improve the algorithm so it can provide users with the best search experience. Changes in search engine algorithms can seriously affect your website ranking. SEO experts closely monitor Google updates for algorithm modifications that can impact their clients\u2019 businesses.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Keep in mind that ranking drops after core updates may be linked to the overall site quality and relevance.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What is the fix?<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/li>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n If your organic traffic is declining rapidly, it could be because your website has been blacklisted or compromised by hackers.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As Google only lists safe websites to its search engine users, it regularly scans all websites for any malware infections. If your website is among the hacked ones, then Google either suspends your website from its search engine or even marks it deceptive, depending on the severity of the infection.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n How can the problem be solved?<\/strong><\/p>\n The immediate solution is to scan for malware on your website and remove it permanently.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n You may also experience changes in ranking because Google itself is having technical issues crawling and indexing your website. A Google crawl anomaly could explain why it is unable to access your website. As a result, it will not be able to index and rank your website on its search results.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What should I do? <\/strong><\/p>\n Analyze your website log files to check for logs about search engine crawlers and affected URLs.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Log file analysis is a technical process so unless you\u2019re handy with FTP, the terminal command line, and file editors, you might use a tool like SEMrush\u2019s Log File Analyzer<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Configure Google Bot as your user agent or check if your website has blocked Google-specific IPs.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Backlinks are still among the most important SEO factors for organic traffic. When a site loses good backlinks,\u00a0 it has a huge impact on rankings and the site’s position in the SERPs usually drops.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you’ve recently removed a large number of backlinks from your website, Google might interpret this as a sign that your content is low-quality. This could result in a drop in rankings.<\/p>\n <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n Acquiring new, low-quality links can also impact your performance in SERPs, so you can lose the high-quality backlinks you already have.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n How to deal with this?<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Websites can lose page rank without breaking any rules or being negligent. It’s just that competitors got better – either faster loading times, the better user experience offered by competing websites, or better SEO practices, excellent keyword research and optimization skills of competitors could have triggered a ranking drop for you.<\/p>\n <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n What should be done?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n
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<\/a>Ranking loss: what should you do? [SEO Case Study]<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
<\/a>Step 1. <\/strong><\/span>Google Ranking Dropped Dramatically? No panic!<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
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<\/a>Step 2. Make sure that your Google ranking actually dropped<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n
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<\/a>Step 3. Identify the source of Google ranking drop [Quick guide based on the client’s case study]<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
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Performance<\/strong><\/code>\u00a0>
Search results<\/code><\/strong><\/li>\n
Date<\/code>\u00a0>
Compare<\/code> >
Custom<\/code><\/strong><\/li>\n
Pages<\/code><\/strong> Tab > check
Clicks difference<\/code> \/\u00a0
Impressions difference<\/code><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n
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site:example.com\/page<\/code> , if the page is not indexed, try to proceed with further investigation.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Causes of Google Ranking Drops<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
<\/a>1. Google Manual Action Penalty<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
<\/a>2. Google Algorithm Update<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
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<\/a>3. Your Website Has Been Blacklisted<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
<\/a>4. Website Technical Issues<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
<\/a>5. Lost Backlinks<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
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<\/a>6. Your Competitors Getting Stronger and O<\/strong>utrank You in Google<\/span><\/h3>\n
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