9 Reasons You Lose Google Rankings, 9 Ways to Recover It

If you are a website owner or a web developer, you must have invested a lot of time and effort to enhance your site’s rankings on search engines. You might even have taken the help of professional SEO and digital marketing services to help you with the process. After all, there’s nothing more satisfying than seeing the website at the top of the search results for specific keywords.

It’s, however, extremely discouraging to witness a drop in its rank. When that happens, all the time, energy, and money spent on SEO seem pointless. But it’s not the time to get emotional and hit the panic button. Instead, find out the reasons for the drop in rankings and select the counteractive measures you need to take to recover it. A reputable digital marketing company in India can help you recover your lost rankings.

Reasons websites lose rankings on Google

Websites lose rankings on search engines for many reasons. We have listed nine reasons here: 

1. Disallowing robots.txt and using No-index tags: The disallow protocol directs search engine crawlers not to crawl and index particular pages on your site.

2. Changes in content: A website’s ranking can drop after a few changes in the content, and the new content does not meet search ranking requirements.

3. Lost backlinks: Backlinks help determine a website’s domain authority and play a crucial role in its search engine ranking. If a website loses some of its high-authority backlinks, it will witness a huge decline in its ranking.

4. Decline in user experience: Search engines determine user experience by taking mobile-friendliness, load speeds, designs, and a few other factors into account. A website that lacks in user experience witnesses a decrease in its rankings.

5. Hacked website: A hacked website may witness a decline in its rankings. Tools such as Google Search Console enable web developers and SEO specialists to determine if a website is hacked and take corrective actions.

6. Google penalty: If Google notices a violation of webmaster quality guidelines, it penalizes websites, which reduces their rankings.

7. Ranking competition: Google Analytics and similar tools monitor the level of competition for a specific keyword. If other sites are posting articles with better content and quality, your rankings are likely to drop.

8. Changes in search engine algorithms: Search engines constantly change their algorithms without disclosing most of the changes. When they make some huge changes, they drastically affect rankings.

9. Incomplete changes during redirections, redesigns, and migrations: If you have not saved the changes after redesigning or migrating your website, it will decline its rank.

Tips for recovering lost rankings

After knowing the reason for the drop in your website’s rankings, you can find solutions to fix the problems. Here are nine tried-and-tested tips for recovering lost rankings:

1. Check Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a tool that enables website owners, developers, and SEO professionals to find out how their website is performing on Google search. It has the necessary reports and tools to measure performance and traffic based on a wide range of factors. You can use the search console to detect and solve problems that impact your website’s rank.

2.Detect security issues and fix them

Google Search Console will show a security issue if someone has installed harmful software or malware on the website. After that, remove the software and malware code immediately.

3. Remove the no-index tags and disallow protocols

You can spot all no-index tags on your posts and web pages using tools such as Seerobots for Mozilla Firefox or Robots Exclusion Checker extension for Chrome. Your browser’s View Page Source option also enables you to identify the web pages that are not indexed. Consider checking the robot.txt file to find any disallow protocol. Discuss with your developer(s) and spot the disallow protocols they have left on purpose. No need to remove those.

4. Perform site redirects after redesign, migration, or refresh

Your website may need changes such as a redesign, a simple migration, a change in its URL, a new domain, or other changes. When such modifications happen, search engine bots re-index the site, and it loses its previous rankings. Redirects help a lot in these cases. Use the 301 redirects or various plugins on your content management system (CMS) to direct old domain links to their counterpart on the new one.

5. Fix technical errors

To improve your rankings, identify and fix technical errors related to the URL, mobile-friendliness, page loading time, and crawl issues.

6. Identify the changes in Google algorithms

Though changes in Google algorithms happen more frequently, you must keep an eye on them to remain ahead of the curve. Some modifications may seem too small to make any difference but can affect your website’s ranking in a big way. Update the site regularly to keep up with algorithm updates.

7. Watch over SERP updates

Apart from algorithms, Google also updates its search engine ranking page (SERP) layouts at regular intervals. It changes its ad positioning, snippets, index, and more to provide a better user experience. Update your website to comply with the SERP updates.

8. Generate more links

The loss of high-authority backlinks results in a huge decline in ranking. To compensate for the lost links, generate more internal links and backlinks for several keywords. You can use several free tools to monitor your backlinks effectively. Generate new links or restore the old ones to enhance your website’s ranking.

9. Create relevant and valuable content

Good content plays a crucial role in improving the user experience. A website that has relevant and useful content enjoys a high rank on search engines. Make sure that the content you create is valuable for your target audience. Craft compelling headings, descriptions, metatags and include relevant backlinks and keywords in your content. You can benefit from professional digital marketing services to create relevant and valuable content. 

In closing,

If you witness a drop in your website’s rankings, don’t panic. Use this article as a reference, find out what caused it, and then fix the problems. Keep an eye on your site’s rankings and key metrics at regular intervals and identify all issues at the earliest.