What To Do If Your Search Rankings Fall

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, January 12, 2008 Leave a comment

It happens to the best of us sooner or later. You’ll fall in search engine rankings for no apparent reason. You’ve been to the top of the SERPs then all of a sudden you drop, and you don’t know why. There could be any number of reasons why. The first thing you should do is make a list of the things that have been done to your site in the last month. By making such a list you can easily identify any problem areas. Here are some recommendations on some of the most common webmaster problems that have causes search rankings to fall – and what you can do about it if it happens to you:

• If you’ve recently changed hosting providers then you might have had too much down time between providers. If that is the case then don’t worry. Your rankings will come back. Just remember, don’t dally between hosting providers. Get it done quickly.
• One common problem people experience is broken links or permalinks. If you have changed your site infrastructure or moved pages around, but didn’t perform a 301 redirect for the old pages then you could have some broken links. That will hurt you in the search engines. Plus, inbound links will not be effective either. You’ll just lose whatever link juice you have and that will hurt your rankings. Be sure you include 301 redirects in your site structure changes; this is a very common mistake.
• If your hosting company has experienced undue down time then that could be affecting your rankings. Just a one time period of being off line isn’t going to damage you, but if there has been a lot of time off line, multiple instances of it in a short period of time, then that could affect it. Call your hosting provider and ask if they’ve experienced a loss of server recently. If they say that your server has been off line extensively then that could be the problem. No reason for alarm. You’ll get your rankings back when the problem is fixed. If your host can’t fix the problem in a reasonable time then find a new host.
• Is your content spammy? If so, that could be the problem. It’s strange, but sometimes search engines don’t find spam right away. You’ll constantly find top 10 sites that are nothing but spam. But eventually they will catch it. If you have just one page of spam on your website then it could hurt you so check your content.
• Non-optimized web pages. This is the opposite of spam. If your web pages aren’t optimized well enough then the search engines may not know how to rank your pages correctly. Did you rewrite any pages? Double check them. You may have uploaded the wrong pages, previous pages, or just wrote bad content.

These are not the only reasons you might fall in rankings, but these are some of the most common reasons web pages, and websites, fall in search rankings. If you need to, call a professional SEO to help you fix your problem.

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