Reasons for a Sudden Drop in Google Rankings
Change in Google Ranking Algorithm – This is the most important reason for a drop in website rankings. Whenever Google does changes into its ranking algorithm with updates like Florida, Panda, Penguin, EMD, Emanuel etc. and you see a decrease in rankings then there are chances that your site has been affected by the update.
Freshness Factor– Site that are updated recently get a boost in rankings for a specified period of time like as long as the story remains fresh. The rankings drops once the freshness factor diminishes.
Malware– If Google has sniffed some kind of malware on your website then they will probably down your website rankings because they do not want the users to visit a malware affected site. The best you can do is to visit Google Webmasters and check the malware affected pages and remove them. After removing send a reconsideration request to Google and hopefully the problems would be solved.
Page Rank Loss– If your site has a drop in Page Rank then it is somewhat a reason for a drop in rankings. Google still supports Page Rank and uses it as a measure to rate a particular web pages popularity. Although recently, the percentage of importance on Page Rank has decreased but still it has not finished completely.
Duplicate Content Penalty– If your site has duplicate content issue then Google will start devaluing your website and drop its rankings. So, make sure to update or remove the pages having duplicate content.
Unnatural Backlinks– This can be one of the serious issues related to a drop in rankings. If you have received an unnatural backlink notification under your Google Webmasters account then take that seriously and do an audit of the backlinks of your site. Use the disavow links tool to remove all the unnatural links to your website and send a reconsideration request to Google.
Site Giving Out Paid Links– If your site is linking to other website by taking money and passing on link juice then this is a big reason to worry. Sites engaged in the practice of buying and selling links often receive a manual Google penalty and it becomes very difficult for that site to get back the lost rankings and reputation.
Google Dance– Rankings fluctuations happens when some Google update is in progress.
Server Issue– Many times server faces problem and remains busy. If your site is down and Google bots face problem in crawling and indexing the site then it could be an reason for a drop in rankings.
Broken Links – If your site has too many broken links then Google considers it as a bad user experience as pages linked would show a 404 error. Hence, find out all the broken links present on your site with the help of broken link checkers and remove them.
Google Sandbox Effect– It happens with new sites as they receive an artificial boost in rankings for a certain period of time. Learn more about Google Sandbox effect.
Robots.txt problem– It can happen that you made some changes in the robots.txt file and that might have prevented Google bots from crawling and indexing your site causing a drop in rankings.
Cloaking/Doorway Pages– Cloaking happens when your site shows different content to the users than what is shown to the search engines. If this is the problem then your site might face a heavy penalty from Google. If your site has a lot of pages that are specifically created to rank higher on the search engines used for spamdexing then find out those pages and remove them as soon as possible.
Violation of Google’s Quality Guidelines– If you are unable to find any issues explained here then have a look at the Google Quality Guidelines and see if your site is violating any of the Google’s existing guidelines.
Also See:-
Use Tf-Idf Score to Increase Site Rankings
How to Check Google Rankings Accurately
5 Points Every Seo Must Follow to Increase Site Rankings
How to Rank in Google
SEO Secrets
SEO Strategies for 2013
Authority and Relevance – Seo Gold Coins
Making Your Seo Roots Strong
3 Seo Fundamentals Every Webmaster Should Follow
How to Create a Google Friendly Site?
List of FREE Seo Tools
Seo Tips for Google Friendly Site
