10 Reasons Why Google Rankings Dropped Suddenly

Suppose you have a website with a great ranking, but suddenly you see that there is no trace of your website even on the tenth page of a Google search. This is a nightmare for any business having a website.

This can happen to any business if you stop taking correct measures after launching your website.

Some businesses ignore the fact of measuring their website’s performance frequently. Keeping track does not only help you find the website’s loophole but also lets you understand the changing behavior of your customers. 

However, if you are facing the scenario, then, first of all, do not panic and try to figure out the solutions.

There could be several reasons for this downfall. Only getting the right metrics can help you improve. If you are not aware of where to start looking, then you must see the below-mentioned reasons to think over.

Always go through your website’s data to understand how it is performing. You can use various tools, such as Google Analytics or Google Search Console, to get deeper insights for better analysis. It will display the stats –

• from where the traffic is coming,
• what type of customers are accessing your website,
• at what hours of the day, there is a downfall in the incoming traffic,
• why customers bounce back, and other information.

If possible, you must have a separate team that will consistently monitor this information.

For better results, you can record the customer's session to help you find the loopholes within your website.

If you see something wrong, you can improve it and provide a better user experience to avoid the situation.

A website’s performance lies in how your customers respond and interact with it. So it is essential to keep a tap on the performance metrics.

Digital Marketing is all about promoting your brand or services through various online channels. It gives an option to market your brand through social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube etc… and also, to rank your website on the first position of google search results, wherein your customer can visit your website by searching your services on google.

Marketing in Digital world incorporates the same ideology that is used in traditional marketing since ages. The only difference is the channel or medium of promotion, however the basic concept and need remains the same.

Such penalties are given by the reviewers at Google when they find out that your website does not become compliant with Google’s webmaster quality guidelines.

These guidelines have several policies that need to be fulfilled to be approved by Google. Through these guidelines, Google just wanted to make sure that only those websites rank that provide the best information to the visitor. 

Some common reasons your website is not compliant include the website being hacked, thin content, spam, and others. 

You must first look for the penalty if there is a sudden drop in a website’s ranking.

You can check penalties on the Google search Console. Log in to the Console and navigate to Security and Manual Actions > Manual Actions section. If you have received a penalty, it will be displayed here with a message to look for the reason. Then, you can start with the troubleshooting process and make the required changes to improve the performance again. If it works, you will see a change in ranking.

Sometimes a change or update in Google’s algorithm can impact the ranking of your website.

Suppose the updates are different from the previous one with different criteria to rank your website. In that case, it must be a critical situation, requiring a deeper study of the algorithm.

You also need to study your competitor's website stats and understand if they are also affected similarly. 

If the ranking is due to the changed algorithm, there might be some news about the update.

You can use different tools for getting SERP and understand how the update has impacted the keywords.

To overcome this, you must look for those pages whose performance has improved and understand their pattern.

Try to implement such changes to other pages. Also, avoid the grey-hat SEO fads as they manipulate the website’s ranking. Using diverse anchor text, avoid content duplication, run site crawls, and follow fair link building.

One of the reasons is the improved ranking of competitors’ websites. It might be rare, but you must analyze their website’s performance to understand the sudden downfall.

If the reasons are still vague, then it could be the Google dance, where some algorithm tweaks affect the website’s ranking. In such a case, you cannot do much. 

If your competitors improve their websites, you must get back to work and start optimizing. It is only possible if they have some significant website changes that have improved their ranking overnight.

But if you see some other website from the same niche as yours have replaced you, then it is worth looking into the SERP’s details of your and competitor’s website. You can use some tools to get such details.

The website’s ranking is also impacted if you use low-quality links and lose high-quality links.

In both cases, the website’s performance degrades. You can use the website's metrics tool to get this information on the lost backlinks and analyze the backlink's history. You can get a list of all the backlinks where you can see if you have any potential backlinks missing. If this is the reason, you must connect with the webmaster.

Also, if you know the website’s owner, you must know why they have dropped your backlink.

If you are making significant changes to your website, such as redesigning, switching CMS, switching to HTTPs, or any other reasons, you indeed have some consequences, whether it is good or bad. It might negatively impact your website’s ranking.

To see if such changes are the reason for your website’s downfall, you should check the Google console and go for coverage. If you see the warning and errors corresponding to the day of the website change, then you must see what change has done this.

Also, always test your website’s changes before making them live; it will improve your website’s performance.

If your customers lose interest in your website, it can undoubtedly impact your website’s ranking, as web traffic is a crucial factor in deciding its ranking. So, you must keep track of the changing behavior of your customers.

To solve this issue, you must work on your CTAs and improve the customer’s journey so they can take the desired action after landing on your website.

To get into details, open Google Search Console, go to Performance, then Search results there, and see click-through rates.

It is seen that mobile-friendly websites have a better ranking, but it does not mean that there is nothing to consider about desktop websites.

But if you do not have a mobile-friendly website, it may impact your website’s ranking.

Due to the increased reliability of mobile phones, most traffic comes from them. If your website does not respond or has an adaptable config per all mobile devices, your website loses traffic.

To check if mobile-friendliness is the reason, you can use Google analytics and filter the traffic based on the devices. If you do not have enough mobile phone traffic, you need to redesign your websites.

There is a rare possibility that Google will change its Search Engine Result Pages. But if they do, it can harm your website’s ranking. Then, you must learn to use the structured data to improve your snippets.

SERP prioritizes paid ads over SEO traffic. Paid advertisements create SEM traffic. But if the SEM traffic conflict with your SEO traffic, then you must take some measurable actions. So compare the keyword in your PPC campaigns and organic traffic. If you find duplicity, you must pause your campaigns as you get enough traffic from organic searches.

Whether small or large whatever be the reason for the sudden drop in website ranking, you must consider it. You never know what could be the reason, as you make the website’s changes for good, but if they are reflecting negatively, then try for alternatives. 

In this article, you will find potential reasons for a sudden website’s ranking drop. So make sure to consider them all while designing your website. It would be better to know them before launching the website.