A webmaster’s worst nightmare is for their SEO rankings to drop suddenly. In a snap, all their hard work is gone. You are not alone since every website will have the potential to experience a drop in rankings. It is unavoidable, but you can minimise the impact of it. A drop in rankings can happen for various reasons. This article explores both obvious and not so obvious practices that could hurt the performance of your website’s SEO so you and your SEO agency can improve your website’s performance.
1.You are creating low-quality links to your site
Links that are artificially created or bought to manipulate page rankings are referred to as a low-quality link.
These low-quality links are from low-quality web directories, low-quality article directories, as well as low-quality guest posts and spam comments. In many cases, these link schemes are considered unnatural by Google and can result in a penalty. Therefore, it is critical to hire an SEO agency to guide you in building high-quality links by boosting your authority and optimising your content.
2.Bad redirects from your site
Bad redirects occur when a visitor opens a URL and is instead taken to a different URL altogether.
For example, you have a webpage about men’s shoes which ranks on Google’s first page. This page receives around 5,000 unique visitors every month. But due to some tweaks in your website design, the developer redirected the URL to the homepage. This is actually a bad redirect because it does not fulfil the intention of the user. The user is actually looking for men’s shoes, but the newly directed page contains little to zero information about the topic.
The content was essentially changed, and the rankings for that URL are entirely lost.
3.Duplicate content
According to Google, duplicate content is blocks of content within or across domains that match other pages or are comparably similar.
If you have updated your website recently and a significant amount of content is duplicated, it can adversely impact your site rankings.
If you have created fresh pages on your site and newly created blocks of content that are largely similar to other pages on your site, these may also be considered duplicate content.
4.Your title or meta-tags have been recently updated
The title tag is a crucial ranking element because it allows Google to understand the contents of your webpage. Therefore, even an incremental change in the title tag might cause your rankings to fluctuate.
For instance, if the title tag of your homepage is a web page design company in New York, and you change it to hire a web designer in New York, then your ranking might suffer for keywords such as web design company New York since you eliminated the word company from the title tag of the page.
5.Content changes
You might also see a sudden drop in rankings after making changes to your site’s content, including the H1 tags. Content is an important ranking factor, and every webpage is ranked based on content. Any changes to content will likely result in fluctuations in rankings.
6.Failing to address technical issues
In many cases, webmasters neglect some critical technical issues that can considerably impact the existing rankings. Three of these are the following:
- Incorrect use age of the no-index tag
- Robots.txt file
- No follow attribute
If your webmaster mistakenly applies the no-index tag on important pages ranking highly in searches, it may result in the webpage disappearing from the rankings. The same holds for robots.txt, where a single line of code might prevent the search engines from indexing your site resulting in site rankings dropping all at once.
Moreover, if a no-follow attribute is applied to the internal pages of your site, it will directly impact PageRank and result in rankings dropping as well.
