My rankings have dropped. What happened?
Search rankings change all the time, but if you’ve seen a significant drop, it could be due to increased competition under specific search terms, Google penalties, a poor mobile user experience, bad backlinks, or low-quality content.
Start with the basics
- Check your page’s status code; it must return 200 – this code means your pages are successfully accessible.
- Check your robots.txt file; make sure the robots can crawl your website.
- Do a search in google such as site:webackit.com this will return your website indexed pages; check if your page’s title and descriptions show as intended.
If any of the above are not working as expected, then yes your ranking would drop.
Check your Google Webmasters tools
Go to your Google Search Console and check if you have any errors.
Go to the side menu and select Index > Coverage and you will get to the page shown in this image.
As you might see in the example provided, this website has a few problems, such as 34 pages with errors and 71 pages excluded. And only two pages are found to be valid.
Using this information, you can analyze the details provided about the problems found on your website.
Analize the details section
Scrolling down on the Index > Coverage section, after we select the Errors and Excluded tab, we can see all the problems google crawl bot has found under the Details section.
He found that 34 pages have a “Submitted URL marked noindex” problem. This one was a cache problem, as the website just launched and had the option not to get indexed-activated. We cleared the cache on our end and resubmitted the sitemap.xml
Another 58 was discovered but did not get indexed yet. This is normal, is the way google works because there are millions of new pages every day submitted to index, you get like a ticket number, and when it’s your turn, you will be indexed. However, there are cases where your page will not be indexed because you provide no accurate, valuable information on them.
Another ten were excluded because of the noindex tag. These ten were normal, where button link’s to add to cart.
Check if you got blacklisted
Yes, you could get blacklisted for any number of reasons such as:
- Email Spam
- Content Spam
- Reports made by users for sexual content or other illegal website activities
- Your website got hacked
- Even for dns or server problems
- There are loads of possible problems
You must do a little research now and find out if you have any problems. You can search google such as “blacklist checker,” find a few free website services for this purpose, and check your website, business email address, and even your IP.
If you made all these checks on your own and you found nothing wrong, then you could hire an SEO expert to help you identify the problem, as you could have multiple other issues such as:
- You have changed your website structure and now you have dead links
- You don’t have a 404 page
- A mobile compatibility issue
- A browser compatibility issue that you don’t know you have beause you are using a notebook and not a macbook (yes they are slightly different in terms of browser functionalities and website compatibility)
- And the list goes on…