If you’re here today, chances are that you noticed a sudden drop in your rankings for specific pages. To fix this problem, you shouldn’t only be asking yourself what’s wrong with your pages. You should also be asking what you can do to adequately address the problem and boost your website’s rank on its search engine results page. It is through identifying the problem and striving for a solution that will enable you to overcome this issue long-term!
That being said, we’re going to share with you the possible causes that your website’s rank has started dropping and what you can do to fix it:
1. Google Has Penalized Your Ranking
While it does not happen often, Google can penalize a website by dropping its rank if its original rank was boosted through illegitimate means. For example, if you were caught doing keyword stuffing, spamming, or carrying out any drastic strategy to manipulate your rank, they can drop it down.
How do you know if this was the case with your website? Generally, you will receive an alert from Google if this occurred. You can check by going to the Google Search Console, then into Security and Manual Actions to look for penalties. If it were indeed a penalty that dropped your rank, you would need to fix everything stated in the penalty’s description. Note that you may not be able to re-attain your old rank right away because the ranking algorithm will rerank your page as if it were new.
2. Some Pages Are Tagged with “NoIndex”
Sometimes, some of your most valuable pages do not appear on a search result. One of the possible causes for this is that you may have accidentally left a “NoIndex” tag on the web page’s “<head>” section. This meta tag lets Google know not to index the page, which can seriously hurt your SEO efforts if it wasn’t intentional.
How did such a tag get in there in the first place? Well, if you were developing the page, it may have been left there accidentally. Regardless, to fix this problem, first go to Google Search Console and see if the “NoIndex” error exists. If the website is new, you may need to crawl the site first before carrying out this fix. If it is indeed “NoIndex” that has caused the trouble, go ahead and remove the tag.
3. Duplicate Content Exists on the Website
The older your website is, the likelier it is that duplicate content exists. This is because not only is there the chance that you have rewritten the same content, but someone else has written the same content on their website. Google won’t know which one is the original content and will guess which version to show. If they showed the wrong one, your ranking takes a hit.
A simple fix to this problem is to tell Google exactly which content is the original content, also known as the canonical content. You can do this by adding the canonical tag to the page’s URL. Apart from this, you can also remove duplicate content. Still, if you need to maintain multiple URLs for a specific product or service, then the canonical tag fix is the solution you will need to implement.
Conclusion
Apart from the possible causes we’ve talked about so far, there are a few other possibilities for your sudden drop in website rank, including not updating the website for Page Experience, lacking quality external links, and more. Regardless, there is always a reason for your rank to drop, meaning there’s a fix for it. Go ahead and try to check if any of the causes we’ve shared are your causes. If they are, try out the fix we’ve shared with you. Remember that even after you fix them, you will need to be patient for your rank to be restored. This can take days, weeks, or even months. However, do them anyway, knowing that sooner or later, you will regain your rank and boost online reach!
NESMA Group offers business owners the solutions they need to maximize their online presence and reach out to new customers with online advertising. If you need SEO services to help maximize your website’s SEO, work with us today!