What To Do If Your Website Loses Rankings
It’s only natural that search engine rankings fluctuate. They do it all the time. Sites go up then go down. Go up again. Then down. And up. And down again.
Usually, such fluctuations are only one or two rankings at a time. But you’ll also often see a site drop a page or two then go back up again. These sort of fluctuations are only normal. They are caused by a few things:
- The search engines could be updating their algorithms or ranking factors
- Your competition has improved their search performance
- Some well-written blog posts have jumped high up in the rankings, pushing everyone else down, but they usually fall just as quickly as they rise
- Some social media viral marketing content has risen, but it too will fall
- There was a ripple in the ionosphere and it caused a wave in the search engine rankings (just kidding)
The point is, ranking fluctuations happen for different reasons. But they DO happen. So don’t panic.
However, if you see that this happens to you and you don’t gain your rankings back in a reasonable amount of time then I’d suggest you do some link building to the pages that fell in the rankings. Take your keywords for that page, write some articles and include the keywords in anchor text links that point back to your site. Do some social media marketing and blogging. Whatever it takes, but build links. Many times you’ll find your rankings coming back after you’ve built more solid links to your pages.
13 Responses to “What To Do If Your Website Loses Rankings”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
Tel - 781-999-1222
nick@brickmarketing.com
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
Hey Nick,
first time reader. Like the blog and your rebuttal to googlecache about on page elements. Regarding the above can you recommend any solid blog posts about non paid linking practices?
@Breakline – Thanks for reading and your question! For link building information, advice and strategies I would read the work of Eric Ward as he is the best Link Building guru (I think anyway) in our field:
http://www.ericward.com/
Hope this helps!
- Nick
Hi Nick, nice post….. but I would like to add one (strange) thing that happened to my site recently.
My home page used to rank well for a specific keyword combination. At one day it went down in de rankings with 150 positions ?!? For another keyword the ranking of my homepage didn’t change. Linkbuilding doesn’t bring it back (trying for 6 months)
Seems that google has the possibility to influence the rankings by hand.
Hi Wilbert…sorry to hear that. When a site drops like this, I always recommend re-tracing your steps when it first decreased in positioning and by process of elimination try to find out what happened. Best of luck and thanks for your comment!
Great article, I have done most of the above mentioned.. Site building, blogs etc.
I too have had a good run with Google… That is until I found that competion was fraud clicking when I ranked near the top. I tried filtering and funneling and everything else. I even examined the Google fraud click dept, where as they stated they are trying to control this, but I found that @ $20 click, the conversions were not worth the time or effort and after spending $3k /mo for three years, it was a waist of time, money and effort.
Back to print adds
Hi Ken – Thanks for reading…it is too bad to hear about Google Adwords PPC not working well, I always recommend testing and using a nice mix of SEO, SEM, Social Media etc…
Hey Nick can you please give me some good places for social media marketing and blogging were i can post with no problemes
Thanks
Hay Nick, can you please tell that why some websites takes too long to get their 1st ever google PR even if they have quality content in them and have good backlinks as well?
Hi Karim – Here is a great list of social networking sites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites
Regarding blogs, I would suggest that you research local and industry blogs that target the demographics of your customers and website visitors. The key thing to remember is that social media marketing is that it is a building process…
Hi tajgames – Website age and trust factor tends to be very important. I tend to not really concentrate on Google page rank and more on visitors, sales and leads that are generated as a result of good search engine positioning…thanks for reading!
Nice post Nick,
I try to say many of the same things you have mentioned here relating to rankings of sites. Ranking high on search engines is an ongoing process. Besides ensuring your on page website structure is tip top, building quality links on related sites shows search engines that your site has a buzz in the online world. Very important. Some nice articles on here Nick.
Hi TechWyse Toronto – Thanks for reading and your kind words!
Hey Nick,
Loses ranking by a few places make sense, but there are times that a web page loses ranking by going back a few pages.
we all know that as much as their are seo activities to help web site ranking, there are activities that seo companies hired by competitors can do to harm other site ranking.
Can you tell us something about popular activities that an seo company can do to harm a site ranking and how can a web site owner defend from those.
Thanks for great information
Hi Amit,
Thanks for your comment and for reading. The only type of competitive negative issues that I have seen is when a competitor purchases bad links for another website. You can protect yourself by using Google webmaster tools and conducting frequent link audits. Most of the time when there are poor quality in bound links to a site they have a very low trust factor and tend to do little harm…I hope this helps.