Drop In SERPs – What Should You Do?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, October 17, 2009 Comments (2)

If you’ve noticed a recent drop in your search engine rankings you may or may not have a cause for alarm. It’s important to understand that frequent fluctuations in the search engine results occurs. You’ll rise and fall like the tide. However, large drops that are sudden could be caused by a number of things – not all of them within your control.

One reason you could have dropped in the search engine rankings is your site was hacked and you are beginning to see keywords that are not related to your niche appear in your site content. That’s not good. You want to remove those as soon as possible.

Many times, when this happens to a website the hacker is inserting links back to his or her site. If that site contains malware then that might cause your site to lose rankings. You could also get flagged as a malware site yourself, in which case Google will block your page from being accessed by searchers. But you want to catch it before that happens.

If you suspect that your site was hacked then log in to your Webmaster Tools account and click on the link for the website that has your concern. Click on the Diagnostics link on the left side of the page. You are looking for any kind of notification that your site has been flagged for malware. Also check your links and crawl errors. If Google is having problem crawling your website for any reason that could be why you’ve seen a fall in rankings. Next, check your sitemap and robots.txt files. If anything isn’t right then fix it immediately.

Comments (2) Category: Webmaster Tools

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2 Comments

Made Thursday, 19 of November , 2009 at 7:49 pm

Great advice, Thanks. What a nightmare to be hacked like that. Would there be any indication of that happening OTHER than your site dropping ranking? Geez, if that is the only way to tell, sounds like it’d be easy to miss and lots of damage could be done.
My site got attacked by some worm once and it was easy to tell because every single permalink malfunctioned. Fortunately the word press folks fixed it in a snap.
Thanks Nick.

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Friday, 20 of November , 2009 at 7:16 am

Hi Lorraine,
The only indication would be a drop in serps or as you said something not working correctly with your website…thanks for the comment!