If the web pages are not performing well on the search engine results page or SERP, then online visibility can be hit hard within a few days or weeks. This means less organic traffic will visit your site and results in business impact. At this stage we must act quickly to improve SEO strategy and once you notice the signs of a drop in overall SEO ranking.
Reasons For Drop-In Website Ranking and Ways To Get Back:
-
Pages Having NoIndex Tags
When you track keyword rankings and learn that some of the important pages are not even visible in search results, this is due to noindex tag in the pages <head> section. Without indexing and crawling, your page will not have any SERPs ranking. Sometimes the noindex tag could be added during development and was left there by mistake when the pages go live.
Verify the noindex error by checking the Coverage report on Google Search Console. If the website is new and without sufficient Search Console data, try using various tools.
- Googlebot is unable to Crawl Pages
Robots.txt is a text file having instructions for web crawlers, including Googlebot. It blocks or allows access to your pages. It contains a rule for blocking Googlebot from crawling to specific pages, then search won’t be able to discover pages and may affect the SERP ranking as well as visibility.
We need to make sure search engine bots are allowed to access the critical pages. This will help avoid major technical SEO mistakes as they understand the scope and limitations of a robots.txt file.
- Having Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can appear on a website or across websites. When two URLs have the same content or taking to the same page, Google chooses only one version and shows it to users, this is known as the master copy or source URL. If you don’t add a canonical tag to a page URL, Google will display only the canonical version of the content and the one you want to rank in Google ranking will not be there.
Remove the duplicate content. If in a case there are multiple URLs, then you should add the rel=canonical attribute to the <head> section of the master copy, and then you can duplicate the pages.
-
Got Penalized By Google
In rare cases, if there is a sudden drop in SERPs ranking can be caused by a manual Google penalty. If you did something drastic to try to manipulate SEO rankings by spamming or hiding text/stuffing keywords then Google will alert you.
Check the penalty and apply the fix to all pages affected. Your Google ranking may not return to previous levels quickly after recovery due to minus the quality issue, the SERPs rank algorithm will evaluate your pages once again.
-
Website Is Not Updated for Page Experience
The Page Experience comprises the latest array of ranking signals, including the Core Web Vitals, which focus on the page load speed, interactivity, and visual stability. It takes many weeks or more to set the Page Experience optimization in motion.
If you have not audited your site or updated your SEO strategy till now, then read Step-by-Step Google Page Experience and Core Web Vitals Guide for complete information.
For more details contact us today!