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How To Troubleshoot A Sudden Drop In Google Search Rankings

This article is more than 8 years old.

We’ve all experienced that sinking feeling when checking our Google rankings; you expected to see a substantial increase in visibility and traffic (or maybe you’re holding steady), when in reality you’ve actually plummeted. In this moment, panic may set in, but fear not—your fallen rankings may not be a sign that all is lost. In fact, most ranking drops are temporary and easily reversible.

Before you start making guesses about how this could have happened or formulating a plan without a foundation, troubleshoot the issue, step by step, to uncover and understand the true culprit. Here’s how.

Check Your Site Status

Your first job is to make sure nothing is technically wrong with your website—these instances are rare, but are generally the most pressing issues you’ll have to deal with, so check them first. The simple way to test whether your site is running correctly is to visit it on a few different devices, including desktop, mobile, and tablet—are any of them returning a 503 or 404 error? If so, there’s a problem with your site, and you’ll have to fix it. However, if your site is returning an error, it shouldn’t cause a significant drop in rankings unless it has persisted for an extended period of time.

It’s more likely that there’s a problem with the indexation of your site. In simple terms, that means Google can’t see your site or otherwise isn’t cataloging it properly. Log into Google Search Console and under Google Index, check Index Status. This will tell you how many pages are currently indexed for your site versus previous weeks and months. If you notice a significant drop, this is because Google has stopped indexing sections or pages of your site, and this can result in significantly fallen rankings.

There are a few reasons this could happen:

  • You’ve removed several pages at once, on purpose or accident, without creating any 301 redirects to replace them.
  • There’s an error in your robots.txt file that’s forcing Google to avoid indexing certain pages.
  • Certain pages have been deindexed by Google due to an algorithm change or manual penalty. This is the least likely scenario unless you’re partaking in malicious activity.

If neither of these broad visibility problems seem to be an issue for you, you can move on to the less urgent possibilities.

Check Your Inbound Link Profile

One common candidate for your ranking drop is a manual or algorithmic penalty resulting from harmful inbound links. There are a few different ways this could have happened:

  • You hired an agency that built bad inbound links as part of an SEO campaign.
  • You unknowingly built poor inbound links based on bad advice or information you found online.
  • You’re the victim of a negative SEO attack. This almost never happens.

In any of these scenarios, there’s a path to restoration, but it can be long and difficult, depending on the severity of the problem. It starts with checking out your link profile (using Google Search Console), rooting out the problem links, and getting them removed and disavowed via Google’s Disavow Links Tool.

Look at the Competition

If bad links aren’t your problem, try thinking simpler. What if you didn’t drop in rankings after all? What if your competitors just gained in rankings, pushing you down? It’s a legitimate possibility, and one that is common when there are major algorithm updates. Examine some of the key areas in which you’ve lost ground, and see if there’s a common competitor who’s risen above you in each of those key areas. If so, this may be the case. There’s not much you can do here other than stepping up your own efforts or attempting to beat your new competitors in alternative ways.

Search for Duplicate Content

I’m guessing you haven’t plagiarized content (though if you have, now’s the time to ditch it). Instead, “duplicate content” in an SEO context usually refers to content that’s been repeatedly indexed in Google. For example, if you don’t canonicalize your URLs, Google may see a URL beginning with http:// and an equivalent beginning with https:// as two versions of the same content. Check for duplicate content in Google Search Console under Search Appearance > HTML Improvements.

Research Recent Algorithm Changes

It’s also possible that Google has made a significant change to its ranking algorithm, resulting in fluctuations across multiple areas. If this is the case, you aren’t the only one affected, and chances are, someone like me has already reported on it. Poke around the SEO community and see what you can learn. If there is a new update affecting multiple sites, learn what you can do to compensate for the new evaluation criteria and make adjustments accordingly.

Evaluate Your Recent Content

It’s entirely possible that your recent efforts have slipped, even if it wasn’t your intention. The quality of your content could have dropped, your audience engagement could be slipping, or your topic selection isn’t as relevant as it used to be. To be on the safe side, perform a thorough content audit (on-site and off-site) and see what you can do to improve your approach in the long term. Actually, this is a good idea regardless of the source of your ranking drop.

Almost every search optimizer has suffered from a sharp or unexpected ranking drop (especially in the era of Panda and Penguin). Most of us will experience another one eventually. When it happens, the best thing to do is stay calm, find a rational explanation for what happened, and if you can’t, simply commit yourself to stepping up your efforts in the future. Backed by consistent best practices, there’s no search visibility hurdle that can’t be overcome.